"Benefits of Tea Tree Oil For Warts and Cold Sores"
It's been reported that essential oils show not only anti-bacterial
and anti-fungal activities, but also antiviral activity.
But it's also been reported that Bigfoot kept Lumberjack as love slave.
What does the science show?
How about pitting essential oils against HSV-1,
the herpes virus that causes cold sores.
There's a drug called acyclovir that helps,
but now there are drug-resistant strains,
and so they were looking for other alternatives
and they found that a variety of essential oils
at a concentration of just 1% could totally suppress
the replication of the virus, including tea tree oil,
peppermint, and on down the list.
But this was in a petri dish. What about in people?
Recurrent cold sores affect as many as 20 - 40%.
Tea tree oil appeared to work in vitro, so they undertook a randomized,
placebo-controlled study to evaluate the efficacy of topically applied tea tree
oil in the treatment of recurrent cold sores.
A 6% tea tree oil gel versus placebo gel 5 times a day
and the average healing time seemed to be a few days shorter
and the virus wiped out a little earlier.
But none of the differences between groups reached statistical significance,
meaning that small a difference could have just been due to chance.
They blamed the sample size, but maybe tea tree oil just didn't work.
It would be interesting to put lemongrass oil to the test,
since it was the only one still effective at wiping out viral activity at even
a 10 times lower a dose, 0.1%, but it doesn't look like that's ever been done.
What about warts? Warts are caused by viruses, too.
Irish researchers reported a case of successful topical treatment
of hand warts in a pediatric patient with tea tree oil.
A 7-year-old girl with six warts on the tip of one of her fingers,
so heavily clustered as to distort the appearance of her finger,
interfering with her writing and piano lessons.
She had undergone the standard caustic treatment
where you paint them with acid, but they just came back with a vengeance.
So her doctors figured what the heck,
and suggested applying straight tea tree oil,
and after 5 days, all warts had considerably reduced in size,
and in another week they were all gone, and they didn't come back.
Not bad compared to conventional wart treatments, which can be really painful.
Whereas in this case the tea tree oil appeared to work with no side effects,
only affecting the warts, in contrast to the standard acid treatments
which can damage the surrounding tissue.
So they make an urgent call for randomized, controlled trials,
but who's going to fund that? It's like pennies per dose.
But the reason we'd particularly like to see
randomized trials for wart treatments
is that they tend to get better on their own,
disappearing without any treatment typically within a year or two.
That's why since antiquity it's been believed
that warts can be removed by various magical processes.
You pay some witch doctor,
your warts go away on their own, and they take the credit.
Surprisingly, such "charming" of warts was actually put to the test,
and had no effect on the warts.
It's interesting how they do these studies, though.
Like this study on whether warts can be prayed away.
They used like a placebo prayer, so people didn't know
whether they were in the prayed-for group or not,
to exclude the possibility that they mind-over-mattered their own wart cure.
That's been put to the test too.
They used a "magic wand" secretly connected to a circuit
such that it tingled when the wand touched the wart
to maximize any placebo effect. And the patients were mostly
"unsophisticated Negroes" wrote these '60s scientists.
Yet, despite their purported "deep belief in magic,"
more warts actually disappeared spontaneously
in the untreated group compared to the magic-wanded ones,
with no hint of the mere suggestion of magical cures being effective.
I was surprised studies like this were not only performed,
but published in decent journals.
Evidently publication followed a considerable debate
among the journal editors, but they wanted to keep
an open mind, they said, but not so open that their brains fall out.