How Castor Oil Packs and Essential Oils Support Inflammation

How Castor Oil Packs and Essential Oils Support Inflammation

Gluten and dairy sensibilities by Queen of the Thrones

How Castor Oil Packs and Essential Oils Support Inflammation

Written by: Jodi Sternoff, Queen of the Thrones® Affiliate
Medically reviewed by: Melanie Swackhammer BA

Est. reading time: 7 minutes.

Do you struggle with constant inflammation flowing through your body? Or maybe you’re a wellness practitioner and you regularly hear your clients/patients asking you for simple ways to calm their inflamed body. Can you relate?

Did you know that topically applied remedies like essential oils and Castor Oil Packs support body inflammation? Yes, it’s true!

These benefits have shown to help calm many common health issues such as:

  • Weight gain
  • Digestive problems
  • Chronic fatigue
  • Depression
  • Anger
  • Muscle pain
  • Skin problems
  • Autoimmunity

Which are all related to that fiery inflammation in the body, most of which begins in the gut. Makes sense, agreed?

So, by supporting:

  • Healthy gut inflammation
  • Adrenal function
  • Hormone balance
  • Resetting your body’s circadian rhythms

We can dramatically amplify the benefits with Castor Oil Packs & essential oils. Amazing, right?

Would you love to know how you can use Castor Oil Packs to support hormone balance and anti-inflammation?

What Are Essential Oils?

Essential oils are the natural, highly concentrated essences extracted from specific herbs in their living state for their healing capabilities that can be derived from:

  • Plants
  • Shrubs
  • Flowers
  • Grasses
  • Fruits
  • Bushes
  • Seeds
  • Roots
  • Bark
  • Trees

Essential oils provide key components of the plants’ immune systems. They help the plants grow, thrive, evolve and adapt to their surroundings.

How cool is that?

For example, they protect plants from bacterial AND viral infections, as well as heal injuries, repel unwanted insects, prevent water loss and other environmental damage.

They also play a role in plant pollination and deliver oxygen and nutrients into the cells. This is why they are “essential” for a plant — without them, plants could not survive.

Essential Oil benefits in the Human Body

In the human body, they play a similar role when applied topically — transporting valuable nutrients to our cells.

This is because of three primary elements  carbon, hydrogen and oxygen – which are common to both human beings and essential oils.

This shared chemistry makes essential oils highly compatible with human biochemistry, and, since essential oils are bio-familiar to humans, they can also help balance and support the human body to heal itself.

Research has shown that essential oils can support us to fight infection (with anti-bacterial, antifungal and antiviral properties), balance hormones and emotions as well as aid in regeneration.

Health Benefits of blending Essential Oils

While essential oils from individual plants are incredibly powerful, the combination of two or more oils can result in an entirely new molecular composition, known as a “synergy” between oils.

“Synergy” meaning “working together in harmony.”

Findings on medicinal plants in Phytotherapy Research compared the antimicrobial activity of clove and rosemary essential oils alone and in combination, and found that when the two individual oils, when combined, exerted added antimicrobial effects against bacteria, yeast overgrowth, and mold.

My two favorite examples, when it comes to inflammation, are how the anti-inflammatory effect of Roman chamomile is amplified when mixed with lavender while the antispasmodic effects of caraway are enhanced by peppermint.1

Helpful in relieving irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and indigestion! Such valuable combinations, would you agree?

Combining Essential Oils with Queen of the Thrones® Castor Oil

When we combine Queen of the Thrones® Castor Oil with essential oils this can enhance the beneficial effects of the essential oil, allowing them to be more easily assimilated into your body.

Queen of the Thrones® Castor Oil is rich in ricinoleic acid, which easily permeates through the epidermal barrier, or first layer of the skin, due to its low molecular weight,² then into the dermis where the blood and lymphatic vessels are housed.

This factor, when combined with Queen of the Thrones® Castor Oil, allows essential oils to be more easily and gradually assimilated into your system, by helping them permeate deeper into your tissues.

 

Dilution with Queen of the Thrones® Castor Oil also prevents the essential oil from evaporating as fast as it would if not used with a carrier oil.

Also, this dilution makes it easier to apply essential oils over a larger area of skin, increasing that beneficial absorption.

The Benefits of Castor Oil

Queen of the Thrones® Castor Oil possesses “remarkable effects”, adding to it being the best carrier oil, due in part to its unique active component – ricinoleic acid, such as:

  • Anti-inflammatory3 and analgesic (pain reliever)4
  • Antioxidant and antihistamine5
  • Dopamine support6-7
  • Nitric oxide support8
  • Smooth muscle contraction stimulation9
  • Skin emollient
  • Carrier oil

 

This anti-inflammation compound of ricinoleic acid helps reduce liver and gallbladder inflammation to allow for easier flow through the bile ducts allowing for easier natural elimination of bile and fat-soluble toxins.

As well as a great emollient for your skin, and is the best carrier oil available.

The Benefits of Essential Oils

Essential oils possess similar anti-inflammatory properties specifically helping to reduce oxidative stress.10

This anti-inflammatory activity of essential oils is due to their major plant compounds, including polyphenols, which is a category of beneficial plant compounds thought to offer various health benefits, including:

  • Hormone balance
  • Adrenal support
  • Calming an inflamed gut
  • Supporting your natural sleep cycles
  • Skin emollient
  • Circadian rhythm

The Benefits of Castor Oil Packs

Queen of the Thrones® Castor Oil Packs for Liver are an equal partnership between both Castor Oil and the compress, complementing each other with the great healing properties they each help support and regulate in the body.

But remember, these activities are only acting at half capacity without the Queen of the Thrones® Castor Oil compress.

Compression is an important part of functional and integrative medicine that has been used for much time.

The application of the Castor Oil compress activates skin receptors and stimulates the visceral somatic reflexes with the placement of the pack over specific dermatomes of the body.11-12-13-14-15

This placement over the liver, gallbladder, large intestine, small intestine, stomach, pancreas, kidney and adrenals shifts the body into a parasympathetic relaxation state.16-17

Adding to the results of further benefiting:

  • Liver Detox18
  • Lymphatic drainage19and cleansing
  • Constipation relief20
  • Less inflammation21
  • Enhanced relaxation and better sleep22-23-24-25

Due to the feedback mechanism activating and enhancing blood flow to those organs.

So when we combine Caster Oil with a Queen of the Thrones® Castor Oil Pack this stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system and lymphatic flow and regulates the immune system promoting liver detox, better bowel movements, less bloating, improved stress and sleep, and therefore an overall improvement in hormonal balance.

Because attention goes where energy flows.

How do Castor Oil Packs + Essential Oils Calm Inflammation?

So, when you combine anti-inflammatory essential oils with anti-inflammatory carrier tools like Queen of the Thrones® Castor Oil Packs to help drive the restorative nature of oils more deeply into your system, it helps to maximize the active properties of both remedies. Amazing, agreed?

My favorite anti-inflammatory Essential Oils to combine with Castor Oil Packs

Plant compounds like polyphenols and flavonoids have been shown to improve blood flow and reduce inflammation.26

And it’s the process of distilling these concentrated plant essences into essential oils that makes them more accessible to help support anti-inflammation

Vibrant Blue Oils offers organic essential oils that are formulated by practitioners into blends that are clinically tested and reviewed to support healthy hormone balance and adrenal health, balance circadian rhythm and support healthy sleep patterns along with calming gut inflammation.

My top 4 favorite blends to use with Queen of the Thrones® Castor Oil Packs are:

  1. ParasympatheticTM
  2. LiverTM
  3. Liver SupportTM
  4. Gall BladderTM

Thank you for being here! I hope you found new ways to talk to your clients/patients about how they can use essential oils and Castor Oil Packs to calm stress and inflammation flowing in through their body.

Jodi’s bio:

Jodi Cohen is a bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and founder of Vibrant Blue Oils, a top resource for essential oils online, which welcomes 300,000 visitors every year.

Her #1 bestselling book, Healing with Essential Oils, synthesizes decades of leading scientific research to help explain how essential oils can work to support the body and the brain.

Read more of our blog posts written by Queen of the Thrones® Affiliates here:

Can I boost fertility with Castor Oil Packs?

3 ways Castor Oil Packs can help you sleep better

Is liver detox the missing piece to your autoimmune flares?

Are you a practitioner, health coach or wellness influencer? If you’re interested in…

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Click here for references

1. Micklefield G, Jung O, Greving I, May B. Effects of intraduodenal application of peppermint oil (WS(R) 1340) and caraway oil (WS(R) 1520) on gastroduodenal motility in healthy volunteers. Phytother Res. 2003 Feb;17(2):135-40. doi: 10.1002/ptr.1089. PMID: 12601675.

2. PubChem [Internet]. Bethesda (MD): National Library of Medicine (US), National Center for Biotechnology Information; 2004-. PubChem Compound Summary for CID 643684, Ricinoleic acid; [cited 2022 Mar. 16].

3. Boddu SH1, Alsaab H2, Umar S3, Bonam SP2, Gupta H2, Ahmed S3. Anti-inflammatory effects of a novel ricinoleic acid poloxamer gel system for transdermal delivery. Int J Pharm. 2015 Feb 1;479(1):207-11. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpharm.2014.12.051. Epub 2014 Dec 24.

4 & 21. Vieira C et al. .Effect of ricinoleic acid in acute and subchronic experimental models of inflammation. Mediators Inflamm. 2000;9(5):223-8. PMID: 11200362.

5. Al-Mamun MA, Akter Z, Uddin MJ, Ferdaus KM, Hoque KM, Ferdousi Z, Reza MA. Characterization and evaluation of antibacterial and antiproliferative activities of crude protein extracts isolated from the seed of Ricinus communis in Bangladesh. BMC Complement Altern Med. 2016 Jul 12;16:211. doi: 10.1186/s12906-016-1185-y. PMID: 27405609; PMCID: PMC4942971.

6 & 13 & 16 & 24. Francis S, Rolls ET, Bowtell R, McGlone F, O’Doherty J, Browning A, Clare S, Smith E. The representation of pleasant touch in the brain and its relationship with taste and olfactory areas. Neuroreport. 1999 Feb 25;10(3):453-9. PMID: 10208571

7 & 14 & 17 & 25. Löken LS, Wessberg J, Morrison I, McGlone F, Olausson H. Coding of pleasant touch by unmyelinated afferents in humans. Nat Neurosci. 2009 May;12(5):547-8. Epub 2009 Apr 12. PMID: 19363489

8. Mascolo N1, Izzo AA, Autore G, Barbato F, Capasso F.Nitric oxide and castor oil-induced diarrhea.J Pharmacol Exp Ther. 1994 Jan;268(1):291-5.

9. Sorin Tunaru,a Till F. Althoff,a Rolf M. Nüsing,b Martin Diener,c and Stefan Offermannsa,d,1 Castor oil induces laxation and uterus contraction via ricinoleic acid activating prostaglandin EP3 receptors. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Jun 5; 109(23): 9179–9184. Published online 2012 May 21. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1201627109 PMID: 22615395

10. Érica Martins de Lavor, Antônio Wilton Cavalcante Fernandes, Roxana Braga de Andrade Teles, Ana Ediléia Barbosa Pereira Leal, Raimundo Gonçalves de Oliveira Júnior, Mariana Gama e Silva, Ana Paula de Oliveira, Juliane Cabral Silva, Maria Tais de Moura Fontes Araújo, Henrique Douglas Melo Coutinho, Irwin Rose Alencar de Menezes, Laurent Picot, Jackson Roberto Guedes da Silva Almeida, “Essential Oils and Their Major Compounds in the Treatment of Chronic Inflammation: A Review of Antioxidant Potential in Preclinical Studies and Molecular Mechanisms”, Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, vol. 2018, Article ID 6468593, 23 pages, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/6468593

11 & 22. Walker SC1, Trotter PD2, Swaney WT2, Marshall A3, Mcglone FP4. C-tactile afferents: Cutaneous mediators of oxytocin release during affiliative tactile interactions? Neuropeptides. 2017 Aug;64:27-38. doi: 10.1016/j.npep.2017.01.001. Epub 2017 Jan 19. PMID: 28162847 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28162847

12 & 23. Rolls ET et all. Representations of pleasant and painful touch in the human orbitofrontal and cingulate cortices. Cereb Cortex. 2003 Mar;13(3):308-17. PMID: 12571120 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12571120.

15. Sikandar S, Dickenson AH. Visceral pain: the ins and outs, the ups and downs. Curr Opin Support Palliat Care. 2012 Mar;6(1):17-26. doi: 10.1097/SPC.0b013e32834f6ec9. PMID: 22246042; PMCID: PMC3272481.

18. Holm T, Brøgger-Jensen MR, Johnson L, Kessel L.Glutathione preservation during storage of rat lenses in opti-sol-GS and castor oil. PLoS One. 2013 Nov 19;8(11):e79620. Doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0079620. eCollection 2013. PMID: 24260265.

19. Holmes GM, Browning KN, Babic T, Fortna SR, Coleman FH, Travagli RA. Vagal afferent fibres determine the oxytocin-induced modulation of gastric tone. J Physiol. 2013 Jun 15;591(12):3081-100. doi: 10.1113/jphysiol.2013.253732. Epub 2013 Apr 15. PMID: 23587885; PMCID: PMC3832121.

20. Arslan GG, Eşer I. An examination of the effect of castor oil packs on constipation in the elderly. Complement Ther Clin Pract. 2011 Feb;17(1):58-62. doi: 10.1016/j.ctcp.2010.04.004. Epub 2010 May 18. PMID: 21168117 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21168117

26. Sorond FA, Lipsitz LA, Hollenberg NK, Fisher ND. Cerebral blood flow response to flavanol-rich cocoa in healthy elderly humans. Neuropsychiatr Dis Treat. 2008 Apr;4(2):433-40. PMID: 18728792; PMCID: PMC2518374.

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