Ginger Oil Painkiller…The Poor Man’s Emu Oil?

Well, my friends, we’d better preface this with a little caveat:

You’re not reading a) science; b) a medical webpage; or c) even a mainstream woo-woo alternative medicine site. You’re reading a wacky little old lady’s blog, so you’re freaking nuts if you take any of this seriously.

Do not, do not, do NOT apply what follows to an open wound, to your acne, or to any source of pain whose cause you don’t understand. If you don’t know what ails you, GO TO A DOCTOR. This is an experiment, and I, Funny about Money, am not responsible for whatever happens to you if you fail to seek medical advice before fooling with your body.

Okay. That said, did you know there’s a new woo-woo alternative painkiller in the form of the fat of the emu? Yes. We’re told that oil derived from the thick layer of fat sported by the exotic Australian flightless bird will cure whatever ails you in the aches and pains department. Got arthritis? Rub it on your sore joints. Decided to go for a mile-long run without training? Rub it on your shin splints. Chiropractor tell you that your achin’ back is fibromyosis? Rub it in! Older than Methuselah and hurt all over your wrinkled, shriveled body? Slather the stuff on!

We’re even told it will cure your eczema (usually spelled wrong in testimonials) and cause your male-pattern baldness to go away.

Taken by the wonders of this particular snake oil, I wandered about the Web following the exclamations of joy and faith, and at one point even came across something that looked like actual science, suggesting (sort of) that the stuff may work. But given the number of people who remarked that it makes you smell of poultry, I wondered why not simply smear chicken fat all over your body. After all, emu, chicken: they’re both dinosaurs. What’s the difference?

{hey, Belagana! We Injuns used to favor oiling ourselves with fat, usually of the buffalo, and I expect if I chose to play that particular card, I could find a way to make myself  very rich, indeed. But let’s stick with the Down Under variant.}

The difference is that the Australian poultry fat sells for about $5 an ounce. Huh…anything that costs five bucks an ounce has gotta be good for you, eh?

Having absorbed this intelligence (such as it was), I went on about my business, munching on a piece of candied ginger to ease the aches and pains.

I’m allergic to aspirin, ibuprofen, acetaminophen, and presumably all other NSAIDs, so there are no little pills (not any that are legal, anyway) to help with growing collection of sore muscles and painful joints. Ginger, as it develops, has been proven to exert some anti-inflammatory action — it takes awhile to work, and the effect is mild compared to an NSAID, but it does help.

Following this train of thought… Some people swear that creams dosed with salicylates or NSAIDs soak through the skin and ease the pain of arthritis and spavined muscles; research suggests the effect is faint, but it exists. And we do know that lidocaine patches used off-label work on arthritic joints — by numbing the entire area.

What if ginger would soak through your skin, too? Would it dull the constant pain I’ve been enjoying over the past nine months?

Hm.

Bird fat. Olive oil. Both oily stuff you can rub on your body, right? Olive oil, we know, has a variety of salubrious effects when applied to the skin and the hair. And as for the ginger, a large chunk of it resides in the freezer. What if one combined ginger and olive oil and applied it to the pained spots in the manner of the vaunted emu oil?

Off to the lab! (Sometimes called the kitchen…)

 

The tools:

Small heat-proof sauce dish
Sharp knife
Blender or food processor
Stove
Fine-gauge sieve

The subjects of experimentation:

Olive oil
Fresh, raw ginger

First I cut off a couple of chunks from the ginger root…

…then chopped them coarsely in a small mini-food processor.

Then mixed this with about a cup of olive oil in a small heat-proof dish and placed it on the stove.

The idea was not to cook it. Get olive oil too hot, and it denatures — makes it stink. Instead, what I wanted to do was just heat it to the point where it was barely starting to bubble. The stove needs to be turned on as low as it will go:

When the compound is just this side of hot, turn off the heat and let the mixture sit for several hours. Probably all day would be good. I let it rest four or five hours. Then come back and run it though a sieve, pressing firmly on the oil-saturated ginger with the back of a spoon.

The result is a clear, ginger-scented oil.

I strained it into a refrigerator container, planning to store the liniment in the fridge. Before putting it away, though, I applied some of it to the sore foot and the sore knee. Wrapped the medicated knee in athletic bandages.

How did it work?

Well, yesterday evening the choir performed for evensong. We had an hour-and-a-half-long rehearsal, then sat through about an hour-long recital (incredible! most awesome organ recital I’ve ever heard, and our choir director and his assistant director are beyond amazing themselves), and then we sang for the better part of another hour.

During that time, not once did I enjoy the sensation of someone driving a red-hot needle into the bottom of my heel. The foot was still sore, but it was mighty nice to be free of the breath-catching stabs. The knee: about the same. The back and hip: hurt like hell.

To be fair, I did accompany my large (and delicious!) mid-day meal with one of my favorite analgesics, gin and tonic. But by 5:30, the effects of that medicament had pretty well worn off.

Got home in time to catch Downton Abbey, during which I smeared more gingerfied snake oil on the knee, foot, and backside.

This morning, the knee hardly hurt at all. The foot: still sore, but no needling sensation. And the back and hip: hurt like hell.

The sun, alas, is far from the yardarm, and besides, I’ve got a ton of work to do today. So there’ll be no supplementation of the gingery regimen for several hours. But it’s interesting.

Possibly silly. But interesting.

Image: Head and neck of an emu. William Warby. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.