Naturopathic Beauty's Clear Skin Sessions
Clear skin and aging beautifully conversations, trainings and challenges by Dr. Stacey Shillington ND.
Naturopathic Beauty's Clear Skin Sessions
The Ancient Healing Power of Castor Oil for Acne
Discover the transformative power of castor oil for acne in this practical guide to an ancient remedy that addresses acne at its root causes. Castor oil isn't just another topical treatment—it's a powerful medicine that's been used across cultures for millennia, from ancient Egypt to Ayurvedic traditions, to support the body's natural healing processes.
The secret behind castor oil's effectiveness lies in its active compound, ricinoleic acid, which makes up 90% of the oil. This remarkable substance provides antimicrobial properties that combat pathogens commonly found in acne sufferers, including staph, candida, and potentially the c. acnes bacteria itself. Beyond fighting microbes, castor oil calms inflammation, regulates the nervous system (especially when applied to the belly button), enhances lymphatic drainage, and supports liver detoxification—all critical factors in resolving chronic acne.
If you're struggling with stubborn breakouts, particularly cystic acne, you'll learn my exact protocol for using castor oil effectively. Starting with the gentle belly button therapy technique before advancing to full castor oil packs ensures your body can handle increased detoxification without overwhelming reactions. You'll discover how combining castor oil with colloidal silver creates a powerful spot treatment that reaches deep into cystic lesions, addressing them at their source without the drying effects of conventional treatments. Whether you're dealing with hormonal acne, toxic burden, or chronic inflammation, the systematic approach outlined in this episode offers a practical, affordable addition to your healing journey.
Remember that while castor oil is a powerful tool, it works best as part of a comprehensive approach to healing acne from within. Your skin communicates important messages about your internal health—listen to what it's trying to tell you and use these techniques as part of your journey toward lasting clear skin.
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Welcome to Naturopathic Beauty's Clear Skin Sessions, where we heal your acne from the inside out. Hello, beauties, and welcome to the Clear Skin Sessions. I'm Dr Stacey Shillington. I'm a naturopathic doctor. For the last 20 years, I've been helping women clear their acne, and this podcast is for you. This podcast is all about how to clear your acne by healing your body from the inside out. This is absolutely critical, especially if you deep, chronic, long-standing acne. You must heal it from the inside out. So this podcast episode is actually super fun. I think that you're going to get some actionable items out of it right away.
Speaker 1:It's about using castor oil for acne. Now, I love castor oil as a medicine. As a naturopathic doctor, it was one of the first treatments that I actually learned, and I've been using it ever since with great success. However, you do have to use it in a certain way, and that is what I'm going to teach you today. So castor oil is a natural skin clearing tool. It is so good. It addresses so many of the root issues of acne. It supports detox. It calms the nervous system. It heals the skin. It is a great tool. Now I want you to understand this is not the solution. There are so many other things that we have to address when it comes to healing acne, and castor oil is really helpful at helping us address many of those things, but I don't believe castor oil on its own can completely clear acne. I've yet to see this happen. I'm sure it's happened for some people, but for the majority of patients we need to use other things as well. But castor oil is such a big part of the entire process. So I really want to teach you how to use castor oil properly so that you can start to implement this into your own life, because not only is it effective, but it's also very affordable. It's one of those things that's just wonderful. So probably one of the most interesting things about castor oil is that it has such a long history of success and so many times.
Speaker 1:People are so obsessed with the research and they want studies that definitively say how castor oil works and what it does. But the thing is is castor oil has been used practically since the beginning of time. There's evidence of castor oil use in ancient Egypt, in Ayurvedic medicine, in traditional Chinese medicine. There's evidence of it being used in Africa, in Mexico. It has been used for millennia to help people heal from many things, and more recently it was resurrected by Edgar Cayce. He was a legendary medical intuitive and he used castor oil to heal nearly every medical condition he saw, and he believed that disease began when the body did not detoxify properly and when the pathways of elimination were blocked. And castor oil is absolutely a remedy that helps to restore flow. So it really helps promote drainage in the body. That's the number one thing that I see it does, and acne patients absolutely have drainage and detox issues. So that's why castor oil is such a powerful remedy for acne.
Speaker 1:So first of all, I want to share a little bit of the science of castor oil, and there's new science emerging all the time. There has not been a lot of scientific research about castor oil up to this point. I mean not as much as some people would like to see, but it is out there and I do want to share what we know about castor oil so far. So castor oil's power lies in its active compound, which is racinoleic acid. It makes up 90% of the oil and this is a really, really powerful medicine. So it is antimicrobial and it's anti-inflammatory. So we do know that racinoleic acid inhibits pathogens like staph, candida and even possibly the bacteria that causes acne, c acnes so it suppresses the inflammatory mediators like prostaglandin, e2 and nitric oxide. So we know this and, as a doctor that's looked at many lab tests, many GI mapping tests, I do see a lot of staph. I do see a lot of candida in my patients that have acne. So, right away, we love castor oil for this.
Speaker 1:But castor oil also regulates the nervous system and this is something that not everybody knows about yet. And this especially happens when castor oil is applied to the belly button, and this is really gaining popularity. I see it start to gain traction on Instagram and what it does is it promotes parasympathetic dominance, which is that rest and digest part of the nervous system. It reduces cortisol and it calms inflammation. And that's because the umbilicus, the belly button, is directly connected to our nervous system and that's really interesting. But I find that nervous system dysregulation is so common in patients with acne. I would say that almost 100% of my patients over the last 20 years are trapped in their sympathetic nervous system. We have to ship them out of it and castor oil used on the umbilicus is one way that we can gently start to nudge the body out of survival Now. By no means is it a magic pill or a magic tool that's going to. You know, one day you're going to wake up and all of a sudden you're going to feel different but it can help to gently nudge the nervous system.
Speaker 1:The one thing that I really love about castor oil is that it supports the lymphatic system. So it has a very low molecular weight, which means it's able to penetrate the skin deeply and it gets into the layer of the skin where the lymphatic vessels lie, which is the dermal layer, and it's able to penetrate into the lymphatic system and it reduces congestion and we know this for sure. It stimulates lymphatic movement as well by smooth muscle contraction, and this is crucial for clearing toxins, estrogens and metabolic waste from the skin-liver-gut axis. And, of course, castor oil also enhances liver detox. It supports phase one and phase two detox pathways. It clears excess hormones and inflammatory compounds and it also can help with skin barrier support.
Speaker 1:So I do use castor oil topically a little bit and I'm going to share how I do that. However, I do find with acne patients, applying castor oil generously on the skin can actually contribute to fungal acne. So I don't tend to use it all over the skin, I tend to use it only with cystic acne, and I'm going to share more about that in a minute. Let's jump into how to use castor oil for acne. I mean, we already know castor oil does so many great things, but how do we actually use it? So some people actually use it orally, and when you use it orally you're really using it as a laxative. I don't tend to use castor oil that way. There's other remedies that I use. If constipation is an issue, I tend to treat it from the root cause as opposed to just giving a laxative. So I do not give castor oil orally. However, it's so good when we use it topically.
Speaker 1:So the first way that I use it topically is as a spot treatment for cystic acne. So I get my patients to combine one to two drops of colloidal silver with a dollop of castor oil just in the palm of their hand and then apply it directly to cystic acne lesions before bed. You can cover this with a small band-aid or a hydrocolloid patch if you want, and just leave it on overnight. So the magic about this treatment is castor oil has a very low molecular weight, which allows it to penetrate deeply into the dermal layer where a lot of cystic acne resides and it drags the colloidal silver along with it. And the colloidal silver is very gentle. It's also very antimicrobial. So that means that we're getting this antimicrobial medicine into the root of the cystic acne, which can be so beneficial for actually fighting that cystic blemish right at its source. So I find this is a terrific remedy for cystic acne.
Speaker 1:Now some people they're a little hesitant to use colloidal silver. There are some rumors out there that it can turn your skin blue. That only happens when you use it for a long period of time and you're utilizing very large amounts. I'm talking about one to two drops mixed in castor oil applied to a cystic lesion for a few nights. This is not going to turn your skin blue. That's not going to happen.
Speaker 1:Do not be afraid of using colloidal silver topically for cystic acne blemishes. It works so well and one of the reasons why I really love it is because it's gentle, so it's not going to dry the skin out, and so many spot treatments that's exactly what they do. They dry the skin out and that makes you more vulnerable to scarring and to hyperpigmentation and obviously we do not want to go there. Generally, you have to use the spot treatment for cystic acne a couple nights in a row. It's not going to magically go away, but over the course of three to five nights it is going to address that cystic acne blemish at the root and help it to drain and help it to go away that cystic acne blemish at the root and help it to drain and help it to go away. And this is also really helpful for the cystic acne blemishes that keep coming up in the same spot all the time. I used to have those and I know so many of my patients. They're like. I have this one cystic acne zit that keeps coming back in the same spot. It won't ever fully go away.
Speaker 1:Try castor oil with colloidal silver. It's really helpful. Okay, so let's talk about castor oil belly button therapy. So this is really increasing in popularity and I have to be honest, I didn't really understand how to use castor oil this way until fairly recently and I started to do more research on it and it turns out that this is one of the easiest and most grounding ways to begin castor oil therapy.
Speaker 1:A lot of times I get my patients to start doing castor oil packs and we have to go in so slowly because that can cause a detox reaction, especially if my patient has a lot of toxic accumulation. So the belly button it's rich in capillaries, lymphatic tissue and nerves, including branches of the vagus nerve, and this regulates the parasympathetic nervous system. So when we put castor oil in the belly button, it helps calm the body, it lowers inflammation and it begins gentle detoxification without triggering a massive detox reaction, and I love this. So I'm now suggesting that patients try castor oil belly button therapy before going straight into the castor oil packs Because, as I said, that can be too strong if we do it too quickly.
Speaker 1:So this is how you do belly button therapy. Oh my gosh, it's so easy to do. You basically just apply two to three drops of castor oil to your navel before bed, you can massage it gently in a clockwise motion and you do this three to five times a week for two to four weeks. It's going to support nervous system drainage and gentle detox. It is so easy to do. And then, once you've been doing the belly button therapy for about a month, then you can start to transition to castor oil packs. So with castor oil packs we're going to stimulate liver detoxification and deeper lymphatic drainage, and this is where castor oil is really going to shine for women struggling with hormonal acne, mold, parasite burden or just general poor detoxification and toxic accumulation. And especially if you're over 35, you've probably heard me say this again you're going to have deeper, more chronic infections. You're going to potentially have more mold toxicity, you're going to have more toxin accumulation and more congestion within your detox and drainage pathways. So castor oil packs can be too strong if we start them too quickly, but once we get to the place where you're able to use them, they really work well to break up this congestion and to detoxify the body. So I suggest that you purchase a castor oil pack. Queen of Thrones has a really nice one.
Speaker 1:And when I was in naturopathic school and we first started using castor oil packs, it was a really complicated layered process. So first we soaked an organic flannel in castor oil, we put it over the liver, then we covered it with plastic, then we covered it with a towel, then we covered it with plastic, then we covered it with a towel, then we covered it with a heating pad, then we left it on for 30 to 60 minutes. So, as you can imagine, it was messy. It was a lot of work. There was very, very low compliance with patients. That was the problem with castor oil packs.
Speaker 1:But now there's these new castor oil packs that are basically like big belts that you tie or you velcro in place around your midsection and there's a flannel layer and then it's kind of covered with a plastic top. So you just put it on and the natural heat from your body is going to get trapped in between your body and that plastic layer and the heat's going to increase. And the heat is necessary because it increases the penetration of castor oil into your body. So it's not enough just to slap castor oil over your belly and, to you know, put on an old t-shirt and go to bed. We need to generate heat. So when we generate heat it's going to increase the penetration of the castor oil. It's so important because we need it to penetrate into the lymphatic system, where the magic can really happen. So you can put the castor oil pack over the liver, and that's generally where I get my patients to start. You can also do it over the lower abdomen, and this is a really great idea.
Speaker 1:If you have a tendency to constipation, it can also be a good, great idea. If you have a tendency to constipation, it can also be a good idea if you have a tendency to premenstrual syndrome, bad cramps. However, you don't want to put the castor oil pack on while you're bleeding because it can increase bleeding, but put the castor oil pack on before your period, when you have a lot of cramping, a lot of pain. It eases those symptoms so beautifully. So in castor oil packs some people even put them on their thyroid. If they're having thyroid issues. You can put them on their breasts If there's fibrocystic breasts happening. So you can put these castor oil packs really anywhere on your body where you're experiencing congestion.
Speaker 1:I suggest starting two to three times a week for 20 minutes and see how your body tolerates this. If you tolerate it fine, then you can start to increase to an hour and even overnight and you can increase to four or five times a week. When I go heavy into my castor oil pack season and usually it's when it's cold outside I tend to do them about five times a week. I wear them overnight and I do it for a period of two months, two to three months. I do this every year and it's just a really great, you know, detoxification booster in my body and I feel it. I really feel how things just start to move more smoothly. So those are the castor oil packs.
Speaker 1:Now words of caution. Castor oil is powerful. It may seem benign because it's just an oil that you're putting on topically, but it can trigger detox reactions, especially if your drainage pathways aren't fully open. If you still have active acne, your drainage pathways are not fully open, so you you can experience skin flares, temporary purging, headaches, fatigue, looser or sluggish bowels. Some of my patients even get the symptoms of a flu or a cold.
Speaker 1:And you also want to make sure you're having daily bowel movements. So key, and the castor oil will actually help. You have daily bowel movements. But if you're experiencing a lot of detox reactions and you're not having lot of detox reactions and you're not having a daily bowel movement and you're using the castor oil plaques, you need to work with a practitioner. Some things you don't want to try and figure out on your own. You just want to solve the issues and that's one of them.
Speaker 1:Okay, so detox symptoms, so the headaches, fatigue, skin flaring, loose stools or constipation, bloating, brain fog and these are symptoms and signs that the body is moving waste. But if these symptoms are too strong for you, then you want to reduce the frequency that you're using the castor oil, whether it's within the belly button or whether it's the pack. You want to either use it for a shorter amount of time, less amount of sessions, and if you're using a castor oil pack, you may want to go back to belly button oiling only and, of course, be sure you're supporting elimination, hydration binders, bitters, antimicrobials, phase two liver promoters, and you may want to work with a practitioner. If your symptoms are intense, chances are you need to work with somebody. You may even need to do testing. You may have mold parasites, toxic accumulation that you don't know about, and feeling really bad and having a lot of detox reactions is generally a sign that you need some help and you don't want to guess with this. You don't want to start playing around with different remedies, because this is your health. You want to figure it out, you want to get it right and I mean your body is begging you for help. If you have acne, if you have skin issues that you're experiencing right now, especially over the age of 35, your body is begging you for help and you really want to get your body the right help. You don't want to keep experimenting and you know I also want to emphasize that castor oil is a tool.
Speaker 1:It's not the solution. It opens detox pathways, it can help calm the nervous system, it can set the stage for healing, but it doesn't replace testing, personalized protocol, structured drainage support, antimicrobial therapy binders. It doesn't replace really critical tools that we use to revive the body. You may need a whole body approach. We may need to do some testing, including GI mapping, organic acid testing, figure out what your detox pathways look like, do some functional medicine, blood work. We may need to go in and regulate your nervous system even more. So castor oil is a gentle catalyst, but it's not a complete solution. I just want you to really understand that.
Speaker 1:So next steps, so you can try castor oil belly button therapy. I think that this is a good step for almost everybody. You want to do it two to three times a week for four weeks and track how you feel, and if you're feeling good there, then you can start to layer in the castor oil packs. Start slow, don't jump in, don't be too ambitious with doing too much castor oil too soon. If you're really stuck with those detox reactions, you're going to want to get some personal guidance. And I also want to emphasize your skin is not working against you. It's communicating with you. It's begging you for help and we have to listen to your skin. You have to listen to your body, because your body is so intuitive, it's so intelligent and sometimes it screams at us and we have to stop and we have to listen. So thank you so much for tuning in.
Speaker 1:I hope that this has given you some really important information about castor oil and how you can use it to clear your skin. I love this new cadence that you know I've developed First of all doing the belly button therapy, then transitioning to the castor oil packs. It's a very gentle, holistic way to move when we're using castor oil, because castor oil is so powerful. So if you want more tips, watch my Clear Skin After 35 Masterclass. I talk about my strategy for clearing skin, my strategy for healing the body.
Speaker 1:This is a must listen to if you're over 35 and you have skin issues. Must listen to if you're over 35 and you have skin issues. And if this podcast has been helpful, if my tips have inspired you or sparked an aha moment, I would love it if you could leave a review, because this is how we reach more women. This is how we help them learn how to clear their skin from within. And in exchange for a review, I am so happy to give you the first module of my clear skin group program for free. So check out my show notes. All the links are there. Have a wonderful day and I will see you in the next podcast episode. Okay,