Gardening

Hey y’all, YSK that applying heat to poison ivy rash provides total relief from itching for several hours. I get it ridiculously bad and so have had many unfortunate opportunities to experiment.

I’ve tried heat gun, hair dryers, nearby flames (!) but the easiest is hot water. Get water as hot as you can stand (you don’t need or want to actually burn yourself), and run it over or soak each rashy area for a few minutes. I often feel an intense wave of sensation at first, sometimes freakishly pleasurable (as if I were scratching the itch really hard).

You will be able to feel the exact area and edges of the rash; the sensation response is very distinct from adjacent areas of healthy skin. Make sure to gradually move your body and/or the water source to make sure you find the entire rash and get that heat soaked into all of it.

As you keep an area of rash exposed to the heat, the strong sensation will fade after a couple of minutes, leaving the rash-skin feeling specifically unresponsive to the heat, similar to numbness.

When you hit that point, where you no longer feel any sensation to the heat in the rash area you’re working on, you’re done. This reliably gives me 3-4 hours of complete relief from the itch.

Make sure you try other areas if you can, btw- If you’re doing this in the shower, you can effectively “scan” and treat your whole body for rashes big and small, since any affected patches of skin will leap out at you with their sensitivity to the heat. (I’ve even found that if a non-rash area has that big sensation response, it’s actually a “pre-rash” that is soon to erupt. But you can already feel the exact outlines of it under the heat.)

It seems like this treatment is reducing immune reaction in the area - and anecdotally appears to speed recovery and limit rash progression. But the relief from the infernal itch is worth it, regardless.

When you feel the itch returning, just repeat the same treatment. Try not to bump/touch the rashy areas, as that seems like it can make the itch return sooner.

This process is made easier if you can get your shower water hot enough, and just move around under the hot stream, or if you can soak in a very hot tub. But I’ve managed in a kitchen sink as well.

Hope that helps someone! It’s saved me from some incredible misery while enduring rash over much of my body.

Check out my residential street's shoulder. All the way down. I pretend it's a moat for protection!