I remember being very sensitive to poison ivy in my early teens growing up in
northern Brown county. All it had to be was springtime and I would get itchy
welts on my ankles and wrists. My parents found some poison ivy extract that
came in a dropper bottle. I would take 1 drop a day for a week or 10 days;
then 2 drops a day for that long and do that all the way to 10 drops a day. I
would start the drop therapy in the winter so by springtime I was up the the 10
drop max and my sensitivity was then greatly diminished.
My mother would get poison ivy reaction regularly and not even be around it.
She stopped getting it when she stopped handling my fathers dirty jeans putting
them in the washing machine.
Bob West
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 08:42:57 -0500
From: gi...@att.net
To: dirt...@comcast.net
CC: Texascavers@texascavers.com
Subject: Re: [Texascavers] Poison-ivy and Karst
I forgot to mention an apocryphal story regarding my East Texas cousins who
were Piney Woods squirrel hunters in their youth and often came home with
poison ivy lesions. My aunt used an old procedure that involved my cousins
taking a certain number (which I don't remember) of ripe poison ivy seeds by
mouth for several (again, I don't remember how many) days. They were,
reportedly, cured of their sensitivity to poison ivy--or, at least, it was
greatly diminished.
--Ediger
On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 6:15 PM, dirt...@comcast.net wrote:
Poison-ivy and Karst
How cave related can you get?? (I'll do everything I can to get this site back
on track)
I grew up in New York and was terribly allergic to poison ivy as a youngster.
Like, someone burned some brush with the vines in the pile, a half-mile away.
Good Lord, was I ever in an awful itchy situation after the smoke passed over
me --. Fortunately my lungs did not react.
When I started to do karst and geological things in upstate NY, I discovered
two things:
1. To see the bedrock I had to crawl on my belly like a snake up stream beds.
2. I could map the limestone without ever seeing it, just by mapping where the
lush poison ivy grew. (THAT is the Karst tie-in)
After I came West, I could more easily see Rocks and I gradually lost my
extreme reaction. But I learned what George cautioned: Immunity is lost by
repeated exposure.
Then I moved to Texas and discovered Poison Oak. It makes TREES going up the
cliffs with trunks as big around as Bob Oakley's thighs around springs in the
Big Bend. ESPECIALLY in what is now Big Bend Ranch State Park.
