Pinworms

[Heritage Essential Oils]

Tami asked about pinworms: Can I use Parasite Free while nursing? Can I use it with my 4 month old? We think one of my older children may have pin worms so I want to treat the whole family if that is the case.

Linda answered: I think you can easily deal with pinworms with raw garlic, but if you want to use Parasite Free instead, I know of no reason to be concerned with nursing. When we had pinworms in our family, we used the raw garlic. Our story is below:

For pinworms, fresh garlic has worked for many:

We smash or finely chop a garlic clove and have the child swallow it. We did this by mixing it with something like a little mashed sweet potato or something to help it go right down. We'd have a cup of goat milk handy so they could take a drink afterwards. We'd do this twice daily for a few months. It actually became a good habit so we kept it up.

     I know they recommend that everyone in the family does this . . . but we had 8 children and there was no way we could keep up with who had their dose etc. for a length of time. We did keep the child in his own bed (we didn't let him slip into bed with a sibling or us) and washed the sheets in hot water and dried them in the sunshine, but the garlic took care of the visible manifestation of the worms crawling out the anus rather quickly - in a few days - so we backed off the rigid sheet washing and just maintained the garlic. It felt to us that we'd killed all the live ones, and now needed to keep the garlic going to kill all the ones that were still to hatch out. 

Life cycle: 

- Ingest or inhale pinworm eggs. 

- They hatch in your small intestine.

- Pinworm larvae continue to the large intestine where they live as parasites, with their head attached to the inside wall of the bowel. 

- They mate there as well, and the males die. 

- About two-three months later the females crawl out and lay eggs, up to ten thousand per worm (I can hardly believe someone counted!) Then the females die. 

- The itching of the rectum causes the child to get the eggs on their fingers, and if ingested, the cycle continues. The eggs can also be transferred from contaminated fingers to other surfaces where they can live 2-3 weeks.

Pinworms don't come from animals.

The most common symptom of pinworms is an itchy rectal area. Symptoms seem to be worse at night when the female worms are most active and crawl out of the anus to deposit their eggs. Although pinworm infections can be annoying, they rarely cause serious health problems and are usually not dangerous. If you can catch a child right after a bowel movement, you may be able to see the pinworms in the stool. It can really turn the stomach ;-/

People become infected by pinworms by unknowingly ingesting microscopic pinworm eggs that can be found on contaminated hands and surfaces, such as:

bed linens

towels

clothing (especially underwear and pajamas)

toilet seats

bathroom fixtures

food

drinking glasses

eating utensils

toys

kitchen counters

desks or lunch tables at school

sandboxes

Susan wrote: We usually take Food Grade Diatomaceous Earth mixed in some juice for a few days and that does the trick. It has to be food grade though. You can buy DE at many gardening stores, but if it's not food grade then it is NOT ingestable. Our kids like it because it has no taste at all. If you mix it with juice it just makes the juice cloudy but doesn't alter the flavor. I'm not sure that raw garlic would go over in our house but that's definitely worth trying too! We personally use about a tablespoon mixed with juice when one of our kids has an outbreak of pinworms. We don't have any infants though. We also personally use DE anytime we want to. If you read Wolf Creek Ranch website page you will see all the health benefits of it!

We used to buy it at Wolf Creek Ranch before we found it locally:  Now we can buy it at our local gardening store called Calloways. We get twice as much at Calloways for about the same price.

Dosages for pregnant women: 

During pregnancy, it is best to start with a small dose - 1/2 tsp. daily for the first few days or weeks if needed, making sure to drink plenty of clean, fresh, pure water (not city tap water) to help sweep toxins out of the body and slowly increase the dose as the pregnant mom-to-be feels fit to do so. This may help prevent a heavy detox by starting out with a heaping TB daily.