Oil of Oregano

Wild Oregano - From Wikipedia

A while back I had a sinus problem that flushing was not really making much as much progress with as I would have liked.  While flushing always seems to work I still end up with the need to do it a few times a year.

Recently I came across "Oil of Oregano."  Several people I knew were using it with great success.  In one case against Candida, in another against a sinus infection. 

Oregano is from the Origanum genus in the mint family.  Oregano is closely related to sweet marjorum (O. majorana) and is often called wild marjorum.  The active ingredient is carvacrol which has been known for millenia to work effectively against certain types of bacteria.

I purchased a bottle and gave it a try taking two or three pills (50 mg Carvacrol) per day.

By the second day the parts of my sinuses that I was struggling to clear began to clear themselves.  Over the next few days a plethora of yuk came out of my sinuses and the telltale "wheeze" when blew my nose that tells me all is not good was gone.  After about the fifth day my sinuses were completely clear.

Now medical "science" doesn't like to hear stories like this because there is always "no scientific evidence" to support the use of these things.  (Nor is there a nice, colored box with  funny TV characters jumping around on the shelves in Walmart.)  This is a good link to the typical kind of thinking you see: no scientific evidence for its action, its all anecdotal, it might have hazardous effects, and so on.

Even if its only effect is that people have been deluding themselves for centuries that it does do something useful still makes it something worth looking into.

For example, by Googling "carvacrol research bacteria" I came up with this and this.   There are numerous other Wikipedia links on oil of Oregano scientific studies that point to a variety of evidence that it does have antibacterial and antifungal uses.

The bottom line, of course for our friends at "Science-Based Medicine" is that only something with years of FDA-approved clinical trials is worth using - and since I can grow wild Oregano in flower pot in my house (which I do) or buy supplements for $10 US no one will invest in the studies to find out if its actually "medically effective".  They will argue that there are no "human double blind trials" to support this - and while true - my answer is "so what?"

First of all, does anyone need science to tell us that we can eat, for example cheese?  Or drink wine?  Or eat olives or use olive oil?  Catch fish?  Milk cows or goats?

All of these have been in continuous use by humanity for at least several millenium.

The question I have is why doesn't science accept or look into that what occurs naturally in our environment and that we have used for thousands of years for this or that purpose have any "modern" value?  (Hint: the answer is money - or rather there is no money in it for them.)

Do I need science to tell me to use olive oil?  After all it was probably manufactured by some more or less traditional method:



Instead I guess "modern science" thinks I should be using manufactured hydrogenated vegetable oil made in a huge chemical cracking plant by some patented chemical process.

(Interestingly we all love and know about Euclid and his geometry from ancient Greece - after all those pesky Greeks got that right - but no, they were just stupid about naturally occurring plants in their environment that provided useful results.)

But before 1900 or so there wasn't any sort of "cooking oil" industry making vegetable or other artificial oils.  Instead people used traditional oils like lard or olive oil (I wrote about this in "Lower Cholesterol = Memory Loss").  

I think there is a clear rise in heart disease, for example, that nicely matches the introduction and spread of the use of non-traditional manufactured oils in cooking over the last century.  No one tells you this because their memory is short and doing so would expose that a lot of what we eat today is created as a way to profit from "waste" in various other organic industrial processes (would you really eat cotton seed oil if left to your own devices?).

Yet "modern science" is saying "you should only be using modern, safe manufactured foods and medicines" as a ruse to redirect your attention away from what humans have otherwise been doing for a hundred thousand years or more.

Oil of oregano is just another tool that humanity has used since time began (it was used in ancient Greece by Hippocrates).

As for side effects there are some:  for example there appears to be many who claim it temporarily raised their blood pressure.

I may be wrong but it just seems likely that something I would find growing naturally outside my house would likely be better that a similar product manufactured in a chemical factory.

This to me does not seem like a supplement I would take all the time - only when I needed it for something specific.