Tea tree oil.

Date: Tue, 21 Nov 1995 21:19:17 -0800
Sender: HERB.TREARNPC.EGE.EDU.TR
From: Howie Brounstein <howieb.TELEPORT.COM>
Subject: Essential Oils

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Or I know where you can get some Violet Syrup, Cheap!
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>The melaleuca information I've been giving you all along is true.

Tea Tree Oil is useful, no one ever said it wasn't.

> I mean the dish soap, laundry detergent, creams, deoderants, shampoos, triple antibiotic ointments, topical gels, etc all contain the melaleuca oil.

Hey, just because something's good for athlete's foot doesn't necessarily mean it's the best herb to use for an every day toothpaste. Doesn't mean it's bad for it either, but careful about generalizations.

>It is a great anti bacterial and antifungal,

Melaleuca oil is good, especially good certain things. Diluted, of course, it doesn't burn the skin. But let's look at other essential oils and compare. Most are very strong, and shouldn't be taken internally except with careful dilution. Many are anti-fungal and anti-bacterial. Cedar Oil is a good example of a much cheaper, perhaps even more local essential oil that you could use for a similar purpose, especially if it's not for your skin, like in a cleanser. I remember reading somewhere, although the footnote's have long been lost under a few season's growth of knowledge, that lavender oil is more disinfecting than the active ingredient in Lysol, (a common commercial household disinfectant in the US - for our friends across the waters).

So don't be impresssed by the more expensive, more popular herb or essential oil, until you check out the cheaper, local versions. Certainly the popular one will have its own uniquely special qualities, but many of these qualities may be found in your local forest or at least your own hemisphere.

I'm not saying that melaleuka is bad, on the contrary, it is excellent for many things.

>and also the best solvent known to mankind.

Certainly there are cheaper more local solvents.

Folks around here, a-working in the pepermint fields, keeping the still a pumping out the mint oil for our peppermint candy, often use peppermint oil directly on poison oak to "burn away" the rash. Don't know if it works, mint oil will burn skin, but it is an interesting ethnobotanical note from the Rainy Pacific Northwest.

BTW, Tea Tree Oil has been around for quite a while. But the movie Crocodile Dundee made everything from Australia popular in the United States for a while, and we started to see Tea Tree everything that cured everything, below wholesale through multilevel marketing, and in the health food stores.

I know where you can get some good Violet Syrup below cost!

http://home.teleport.com/~howieb/treats/fad.html

From: Colette Gardiner <coletteg.EFN.ORG>

hi all, yes Tea tree oil is great but as Howie says there are many other essential oils that work equally well.At the Dispensaire de Femmes in Switzerland at one point cultures were taken from women with vaginal infections and instead of the usual antibiotic testing on the cultures they used essential oils.Not only did they find that many, many types of essential oils killed the yeast etc. but they found that the type that worked best on any given infection varied widely from person to person. Of course that was all in the petrie dish so to speak, but they followed up offering a dilute solution as a douche or suppository of the essential oil that worked the best and had excellant results.

In America we seem to be so absorbed with the latest fad herb of the moment that we often forget about the uniqueness of each situation