Ok, so I’m officially nuts about essential oils. Today I started another experiment. For years I’ve had a 3 or 4 skin tags in each armpit. They’re not worth a doctor’s appointment, but I’d like to get rid of them anyway.
The most extreme EO solution is oregano oil. Oregano oil is considered to be a “hot” oil, because it produces a powerful burning sensation when applied to skin. You never want to put a drop of oregano oil in your mouth, or accidentally touch your eyes after using oregano oil.
Some people advise mixing oregano oil with a carrier oil before applying to skin tags, but wild folks just apply it “neat”. I’m a wild one. I put some oregano oil into a 1-ml bottle, and then used a toothpick to gather a little for application. I then carefully wiped the toothpick along each skin tag, trying to avoid the adjacent skin. Doing this in front of a mirror, this was modestly successful with my right (dominant) hand on my left armpit, and slightly less successful with my left hand on my right armpit. I didn’t know whether skin tags are actually populated with nerves, so I knew I was taking a little risk.
The skin tags quickly turned bright pink to reddish, and a red zone formed around each skin tag, not quite a quarter inch in radius. There was a significant burning sensation, but not unbearable. Eight hours later the skin tags are still luminous, but the skin around them has calmed down.
I’ll continue this daily for a week, and let you know the result at the end.
The first new topic I'd like to introduce is trigger point therapy. My mom, now 86 and moving along the dementia path, learned about trigger point therapy nearly 40 years ago to help my dad with chronic pain problems. She started with Bonnie Prudden Myotherapy, and then graduated to Clair Davies's Trigger Point Therapy Workbook.
The first thing you need to know about trigger points is that most chronic pain is muscular. People talk about arthritis and pain from joints, but even there, I suspect the origin is largely muscular. In many cases muscle pain causes inflammation which then inflames the joints, producing joint pain and bone damage.
The primary cause of chronic muscle pain is trigger points, which are microspasms within the muscle. Either injury or overuse can cause these microspasms. The problem is that trigger points can be extremely persistent, lasting practically forever without intervention. They can pull on adjacent muscle fibers, causing additional trigger points and extending the degree and scope of the pain.
The basic way way to relieve a trigger point microspasm is to deprive the affected muscle fibre of oxygen until it relaxes. There are two major approaches: local pressure and "needling". Needling is not something you can do at home, but the pressure approach is easily administered by yourself or by someone close to you The basic idea is to press on the trigger point for about 10 or 15 seconds. While this can miraculously dissolve a single trigger point, trigger points usually come in clusters, so you often have to work on many separate trigger points. The other trick is that the pain and the trigger point may not be co-located, so it's not always productive to exert pressure right where the pain is. The pain remote from the trigger point is called "referred pain". The Davies book has maps to show you where the originating trigger point might be for a given pain location.
My simplest trigger point story has to do with lower back pain. Nearly 40 years ago I was plagued with sometimes debilitating lower back spasms. It turned out that the relevant trigger points were not in the lower back but in my buttocks. I used the rounded corner of a dresser to relieve those trigger points, and I've only had a back spasm once in the last 40 years.
A more complicated story concerns a frozen shoulder, which developed soon after an injury caused by slipping down a river bank. I first went the usual medical route. The doctor I consulted recommend physiotherapy. The PT was competent enough and nice enough, but the experience was pure torture, with no positive effect. PTs put their full faith in stretching, but stretching doesn't release a trigger point; it just aggravates it. The doctor's next recommendation was surgery. I said no thanks, and decided to focus on trigger points. I reasoned that the initial injury had produced a trigger point which had then pulled on a number of other muscles, eventually forming a huge network of trigger points that caused my shoulder to seize up. Mainly using a tennis ball against a wall, I worked through the many trigger points one by one until the shoulder was complete;y free -- and pain-free -- again. Since that time Davies has come out with a specialized Frozen Shoulder Trigger Point Workbook, but I haven't had a need for it yet.
It took decades, but now many massage therapists seem to have an awareness of trigger point therapy. Perhaps even physical therapists do. The inventor of the trigger point concept was Janet Travell, who was JFK's personal physician because of her magic with back pain.
If you want to learn more, I particularly recommend Davies's The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook: Your Self-Treatment Guide for Pain Relief. It's around $20 for the paperback and less for the Kindle version.