I've been using it for a while do deodorise my shoes. It seems to be effective at killing whatever makes them smell. Anecdotally it also works for killing fungal infections of the feet too, although I've switched to using iodine, which is actually proven to be effective and tends to clear fungal infections within a couple of days.
I had a spray can of 100% tea tree oil that I would spray on my feet. It would sting like hell anywhere I had broken skin but it was effective.
Iodine is much more pleasant to use and doesn't smell so bad, it's cheaper too.
I'm sure there is a more exact specification, but it all seems to work. Problem gone in a day or so.
Get some bleach, mix in a basin with some water. No good exact amounts, it should smell bleachy and be diluted a fair bit past the point of burning.
Do this, then a couple days later, do it again. Whatever has taken residence on your feet will have moved out.
You just apply it topically and it will kill any fungal infection within a couple of days.
All the scientific studies that show up in Google show that it has antifungal activity.
There's scientific testing for tea tree oil that's not hard to find. I'll add my experience to what others are saying which supports it's both useful and probably toxic for same reason.
I got athletes foot a while back. Severe stuff with swelling and bleeding of the feet. They even glowed under a UV light. Trippy. I tried natural solutions like vinegar or baking soda first since that stuff solves lots of my problems. Didn't work. Then, the OTC medicines didn't work. If anything, it's like it went down slightly, then flamed up with more damage in response. It got a holy crap response from lots of people, even some with a version of it before. Like it was a living thing that wanted to pay back torture with torture. Got doctors to prescribe the standard stuff with it not working either. They also prescribed antibiotics in case of infections from the bleeding. Had to bleach and throw away lots of socks.
A friend told me some "folk" story about tea tree oil. Skepticism up. He handed me a study comparing it to a common treatment for my condition with it working in the study. Studies get BS'd a lot I thought. Told me several people he knew had skin conditions treated that way. Placebos or something else not that product? Said I wouldn't figure out what he was giving me. Anyone knowing me or my posts here probably guessed I figured it out before that day was over: a furniture cleaner with tea tree oil as a main ingredient. Lol. So, big container of water for my feet, a few capfuls in it, soak 30 min, and repeat for certain amount of time (can't recall). What to loose...?
Unlike the other treatments, my feet soaking in this stuff felt fairly good. After the time period, it was... gone. Recall I tried acids, alkaline solutions, OTC medicines, and prescription medicines. Then, this furniture cleaner based on tea tree oil killed it in a shorter time than the meds were supposed to with no negative effects. Hell, my feet were even shiny. :) I mean, it did worry me where I wanted to wash it off but they said leave it on. I also kept it up a week or so after the symptoms disappeared just in case. No long term effects that I can see.
"No real purpose." "Folk remedies." "Toxic to humans." These are good replies to all the shit the drug companies and doctors told me to use. None of it worked. It was all damaging in some small or big way. The big being enough that it took more drugs to prevent major problems. The tea tree oil handled the job well fast and with no effects. I'm not saying I trust it in general, think it's a miracle drug past killing the fungi kingdom on my feet, etc. I'm just saying it provably did it's job on living organisms that resisted 8+ months of doctor-prescribed treatments with no sign of weakness until the tea tree oil. I recommend more research be done on applying blends to stuff like that.
One of my hobbies is herbalism & over a long period of time I've begun to recognize all of the purported benefits of EO's come from other ingredients in whatever is being produced.
That doesn't mean that various herbs don't have active properties however. I've moved on to recognize how useful infused oils can be. (Note: these are of course easy to make yourself, not as easy to produce en mass & keep fresh for regular sale, and don't cost much depending on the oil.)
I lost all interest in the subject when Steve Jobs tried to use herbal remedies to cure cancer and, despite running the most profitable company in the world, died of an easily curable form of cancer. What is it that makes people so hesitant to believe medical science and so willing to believe an article on the Internet saying that lavender oil applied to the humors can cure diseases? I know so many people who forget that “essential” means “the essence/scent of” and not “required for life” and I’ve never been able to figure out why without them getting offended and shutting down.
There is a risk here of going down the road of scientism, which is to conflate empiricism and the scientific method itself with a specific, imperfect implementation of it.
I've looked into this myself, and the profit motive for doing well-funded research on plants as a potential medicine are probably 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than for pharmaceuticals that are much easier to control and patent. It can take ~billions to develop a new drug and get it through the FDA process, and it's the potential profits that actually fund the research.
This level of research funding is obviously never going to happen under the current incentive and regulatory structure for investigating plants that anyone can buy for a few dollars, even if those same plants worked just as well as a pharmaceutical drug.
Science is like a high focused searchlight. It obviously isn't going to find things that it doesn't focus much on.
That doesn't mean the things that science has left only briefly examined definitely work (and I anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to sell you something), but it does mean that the universe of true facts is much wider than the universe of things that have been definitively proven through science.
Under the current incentive and regulatory structure, it seems like literally anything they can prove works, they can get a patent on. Pharma companies are so money hungry that if tea tree oil really did cure cancer, they’d refine it and patent that shit in a heartbeat.
The fact that they haven’t says so much to me.
That sort of presupposes that what 'works' about the plant is a single, potent 'active ingredient' that can be identified/refined/purified/synthesized; in other words, this requires you to assume that what is convenient for an industrialized pharmaceutical industry is also an accurate reflection of how human health and nature work.
But what if it were the case that the whole plant extract that is actually the most effective, and depends on some synergistic spectrum of phytochemical compounds?
Note that I'm not saying this is necessarily true, but the way the system up we have a chicken and egg scenario here:
1. If it were true that whole plant extracts were more effective for some conditions, you'd need to do a lot of research to prove it, but the research funding presupposes the potential for profit
2. There's no incentive to change the profit incentives currently (where 'find, extract, patent, synthesize is the default assumption), since we don't have much evidence that we should change those incentives
This is a self-reinforcing set of norms, and changing them would require 'extraordinary evidence', except the norms themselves discourage looking for that evidence. Just look at the state of marijuana research over the last 4 decades as one particularly egregious example.
> if tea tree oil really did cure cancer, they’d refine it and patent that shit in a heartbeat
Not if the pharmacologically active ingredient is present in sufficient quantities in the raw plant as well.
You can certainly patent it, but you won't be able to make a profit since people can just go buy/grow the raw plant.
And if backwards induct from that fact, you find that under under very few scenarios would it be rational to dump research money into it since the people paying for it would never (directly) see a return, even if society as a whole benefits.
Opium poppy != Coca plant
As for your other statements, there's actually an abundance of medicinal plants and herbs which are not commercialized due to having dose:response curves too unpredictable to be productized and sold to a litigious public.
Medicinal value != commercial value
Homeopathy involves diluting things until you're left with nothing but a sugar pill.
Herbal remedies involve contact with actual ingredients that may or may not have useful properties.
Some people go down this route for financial reasons. It is much cheaper for someone without insurance to treat things with OTC things than actually getting insurance while tackling a disease, disorder, or etc.
TLDR: Steve Jobs made a poor life choice. But that doesn’t make everyone not taking chemo or other cancer treatments an idiot. Those are typically prohibitively expensive treatments.
as for tea tree oil, im in favor of phasing this out entirely as it seems to serve no real purpose in cosmetics and is actually somewhat toxic to humans. Its had a number of folk remedies, such as a cure for syphilis and a tincture to reduce boils, but none of these have succeeded in scientific testing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_tree_oil#Safety
most cold process soaps will fragrance at 3-5% the weight of the actual oil. I can speak from experience that 5% tea tree oil soap is vile. The final product emerges with an acrid fragrance not unlike pine floor cleaner, and each bar is brittle enough to crack if dropped. many crack during the curing process, and the final product has a texture similar to the gear shift on a cheap car.