castor oil packs-real treatment or quackery?

Statements like this are why I spend so much on new bullshit detectors - even the heavy-duty ones burn out their circuits when exposed to this sort of drivel. Which "toxins?" Should a used-up castor-oil pack be treated as hazardous medical waste because it's "toxic?" How does the pack "know" what to extract from the body, and how to find it four inches inside, in your liver or whatever? Does castor oil go after the same toxins as "chelation therapy" does?Do the practitioners and promoters of this stuff have any data or the solubilities or partition coefficients of, say, estrogen and pregesterone in castor oil? Do they have data to show that castor oil will extract (in the lab, even - leaving out this ten-centimeter-deep bologna) estrogen more efficiently than, say, vitamin D or vitamin E? Those are also oil-soluble essentials in the body, and D even is stored in the liver.Quackery. With a seven-foot duck doing the quacking.

Sounds like Ichthammol. There's a German patent from 1885 on how it's made, and it apparently really is useful in treating some skin diseases. I've seen it sold as a "drawing ointment," but the label didn't say what it drew or from where.AbE: ichthammol is made from "bituminous schist," according to my Merck's Index. Just in case you wondered.Edited by Coragyps, : No reason given.

No. Ricinoleic acid, which can be obtained chemically from castor oil but is not present uncombined in it, has that molecular weight. Castor oil itself would have a molecular weight around 930 or so - three ricinoleics chemically tied to one molecule of glycerine. Edited by Coragyps, : fix typo

If I were going to break castor oil down to its components, I'd get a tad more severe with it than that. The classic way is the same as soapmaking - boiling hot with caustic soda. Boiling in methanol and water with sulfuric acid works, too. Warming and putting on the skin, not very effective, though, I fear.

I don't, in detail, but that knowledge is pretty widely available in stultifying detail: my bet would be there are a couple of hundred pounds of papers in scientific journals on the subject.http://www.rxlist.com/cgi/generic/asa_cp.htm What bullcrap! That's actually true, I suppose: true in the same sense that it is for every imaginable synthetic or natural compound you could make, from LSD to nerve gas to chamomile oil. Edgar Cayce? Of the "safelands" and all the psychic powers? Puh-LEEEEEZE! PD, you're killing your argument here!

You have me wondering now, PD: a nice thorough study of packs made with 1) castor oil 2) lard 3) lard with an appropriate amount of ricin to make it mimic 1) added in. Chemically, all are near-identical. It would be interesting to see if lymphocytes care at all which "treatment" they get.

Oh, yeah - definitely a heat-only option, too.The US government has an alternative-medicine agency - the one that just shot down black cohosh as a hot-flash remedy. Maybe they'd help.

Sounds exceedingly unlikely to me - the epoxydicarboxylic acid would most certainly be an inside-a-cell product, not an inside-the-stomach or -gut. And we still have no data to show that, and some of your own references to deny that whole castor oil can even get through skin at all. It dang sure isn't going to break down significantly in a warmish pack sitting on a tummy somewhere. Don't force me into buying a bottle of the stuff and running the experiment - I spend too much work time on this forum already!

An epoxydicarboxylic acid would be a reaction product of a fatty acid with oxygen - an early step in its biological breakdown to carbon dioxide, water, and energy. Apparently enough is excreted to use them as a tracer of fatty acid metabolism. I'll have to dig out my biochem text to tell you any more.

I wouldn't think so, PD. Fatty acids are by their nature oil soluble and aren't going to show up in urine at all (with healthy non-leaking kidneys, at least). And the amounts we're contemplating here - the tiny bit that might get through the skin, and the tiny bit of its metabolites that end up in urine, are surely going to be dwarfed by the bicarbonate, uric acid, and all that whatnot that normally regulate urine pH anyway.A swimming pool pH kit would be perfectly OK for Pee pH - except I don't know of anything useful that such a measurement would tell you.

Speculation - hot pressing denatures ricin and/or other proteins present in trace amounts in the oil, and the denatured forms don't cause an immune reaction due to their lack of solubility or reactivity.

Once again, PD - those fatty acids are indeed present in castor oil, but very nearly entirely in chemically combined forms. Specifically, they are present as esters with glycerol, called triglycerides. Exactly the same as how three molecules of stearic acid combined with one molecule of glycerine makes up most of what we call beef tallow. All of the natural fats and cooking oils I know of - lard, tallow, soybean oil, safflower oil, whale oil, olive oil, etc. - are combinations of three fatty acids (those on your list or dozens of others) with one glycerol. (Glycerol is the same thing as glycerine.)
And all of those fatty acids are very close cousins, chemically, to each other. They differ in how they are metabolized, but any of 'em have to get into the body before they get metabolized at all. And skin absorption is going to be a might slow route for getting in.

Like Schraf said: castor oil packs may well not be a "drug," as I'm betting that they do nothing that a Crisco pack won't do. If cold-pressed castor oil has enough ricin or other toxin that actually can cross through the skin and raise lymphocyte counts, though, maybe it should be regulated. Again, though, I'll bet that any such effect is so minor that it's scarcely worth notice.Just don't drink the nasty stuff.