10 Natural Remedies for Spider Bites

It seems regular tea bags will pull the poison out of spider bites, an abscessed tooth or any place where poison is causing swelling.

Http://www.earthclinic.com/cures/skin_infections.html

My family and I live in the Northeast Georgia mountains where insects thrive indoors and outdoors. A few years ago while I was building our new home in the mountains my wife, my daughter and myself lived in a small cabin around 500 sq. Ft. Within a few days of each other my wife and daughter we both bitten behind one ear by a Brown Recluse spider. My daughters bite wound healed fairly quickly but my wife's turned out to be the size a 50 cent piece and and was very painful. The bit wound looked like it went to the skull and was open and oozing. Her doctor prescribed antibiotics which she took religously for several weeks with no apparent relief or healing. She wen back to our doctor and he said surgery was the only option. To cut out the bite site. My wife and I talked over and her biggest concern was the pain and her inability to sleep and she did not want to have surgery. I called friends and finally spoke wiht one that knew an old man that lived with his wife in North Carolina and was known as the "Spider Man". I can't remember his name but he appeared to be around 80 and showed me his herb garden and described all sorts of natural treatments for ailments. He looked at my wife's bite and said he had the cure. He said it would require at least two trips back to his house. He used sterile tweezers and said he had to get the core out of the wound. It appeared to look like a small whiteish cork. Once the core was out he went to his freezer and pulled out a ziplock baggie that looked like ground up grass. He said it was Wild Hydrangea, from the stem after the thin brown bark covering was removed and it was chopped finely up. He put this cold compress containing the wild Hydrangea in some gauze and wrapped it around my wifes head until the poutice was on the wound. He said to leave it there three days then come back on the third day. When he removed the gauze on the third day the wound had shrunk to 1/5 its original size and was beginning to close up. One more treatment with the Wild Hydrangea for another three day period totally closed the wound. My wife is back to her old self with barely a scar behind her ear. This really worked where modern medicine failed!

Therefore it also works for poison ivy, oak and sumac. There was a very helpful comment about the urushiol being the active agent and once that is washed off (of everything!) the clear fluid from the blisters is not an irritant. Thankfully I just got a very mild case (through a hole in a jersey glove I think) between my middle and ring fingers on one hand. I just ran a trickle of hot tap water over it as long as I could stand it a few times (maybe I only needed to do it once ;-) and that was way hot enough to assuage the itch, again for several hours.

Getting a child to bear the heat for even a short duration is another topic!

Thank you, Earth Clinic!!

It says not to: Do not apply electricity to the area. Anecdotal reports of high voltage electrotherapy from common stun guns have never been shown to be effective in any scientific studies. This can also cause secondary burns and deepen tissue destruction.

Just a thought.

I chose not to go to the same doctor...but went back to a doctor whom had previously treated a bite from the brown recluse years earlier. He said not to lance the blister..and said he would not be giving me the steroid shot he gave me previously. I had been bitten years earlier on the back by a brown recluse which took 5 months to heal.

Well this time I decided to take the matter into my own hands and found this website. I have been using a mixture of antibacterial salve and baking soda... also used activated chacoal. I have switched between the two and mixed the olive leaf extract with the baking soda. I can say I am almost to the point of no longer having dead tissue..and starting the complete healing process. It has still been a painful process however...I truly believe with out the information the wound would've been deeper and taken months longer to heal...and it was in very soft tissue..the belt line.

I immediately put rubbing alchohol on it and that burned the site. Then I forgot about it for a couple days while busy at work. It continued to weep and itch with a sticky substance at the site. That is when I started to research "spider bites" on the web and found this awesome site. I immediately went to a health food store and purchased some activated charcoal capsules. I made a paste with water and applied it to the site and bandaged it as the charcoal stains. I did this 3 times for 3 days. I also took a couple of capsules of the charcoal by mouth for several days as I felt nauseous and it helped calm my stomach. Then I read where someone mentioned getting a permanent "tatoo" impression from the charcoal so I switched to baking soda. I could feel it working immediately into the site. I used the baking soda covered with a bandage for another 3 days and saw the redness start to disappaint for the 1st time. The size of the bite never got any bigger but the redness would not subside for about 10 days or so. Then I started to use an organic "witch hazel" from the health food store that was labeled as a "medicated superhazel". It was a "topical pain reliever" that included aloe vera, Calendula, Clove, Grapefruit seed, Peppermint oil and witch hazel. It felt so right and good. I saw dramatic results within hours. The redness started to tone down and the next day the "bull's eye" circle was smaller. It has continued to improve each day dramatically and after 3 days of using this super witch hazel it is almost disappeared. The center has formed a dark scab that is tiny and the surrounding bite site has almost disappeared entirely. I used the witch hazel with a cotton ball and applied it approx. 3-4 times, daily. I will continue to use this until it is gone. If I had to do it over again I think I would eliminate the charcoal poltice as it is very messy and stains everything. I think the baking soda does the same trick of pulling out the poison. I would take the charcoal, orally, though as I do believe it soaks up the venom in your system. I waited too long before starting the process and think if I used the baking soda in combination with the medicated witch hazel it would have improved the 1st week. I am going into week 3 and feel really good that I found this web site. Thanks everyone who has added comments.

Kudos to your remedy and for your skeptical readers, I can say that this really works! Thanks...

I took 3-4G every 1.5 hours or so after getting home and continued the next day. Never got any signs of overdosing ie gas or diarrhea. I estimate I took 40G over 24 hours! It killed most of the swelling by nightfall the day of the trip!

Also had an employee get stung by a wasp. He told me the last time he got bit he had to go to the hospital. I gave him 5G and sent let him leave. He told me in an hour or so the pain and swelling had diminished greatly. He didn't have anymore vitamin C but he didn't need to visit the hospital!

In 1989 I was bitten by a recluse on the calf, and used meat tenderizer and charcoal for the first 5 days. I'd packed the growing hole with one, leave it in for hours, then wash it out and pack it with the other. The thing that had me scared was that it was doing everything the book said it would do, not only a hole 1/4" deep and 3/8" across, but a hot red raised area 3" across with a starlike effect of redder lines within it. I called a fellow who'd worked at Uchi Pines doing alternative medicine, to ask if I really needed to shock it, and he said it sounded that way. We grounded one side of the bite with a screwdriver from the woven wire fence, then ran a wire from the electrified top wire to the other side, using insulated pliers to hold it. I ran the shocks through the bite area, and it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd feared. The shocks ran only in that small area, more like a little bite than having my whole body shocked. 24 hours later the hole had obviously not grown any more, and in another 12 hours the hot red raised area was nearly normal. The whole thing just faded away, leaving me with a small blue scar.
In 1991 I noticed two little red marks on a knuckle and thought the same thing I'd thought the first time, "Those are just far enough apart to be spider fang marks." Six days went by, and I woke up to a little brown oozy hole in the middle of each pink mark. There was a PT working across the street, so I called and asked if she'd run electrostim on them. She said come on over, and told me that she used to use ultrasound and Betadine on such bites, but as I insisted on electrostim, she flipped a switch and did all 3 at once. The wounds closed up that afternoon.

The next time it happened, it was like some people describe the bites, I got a black spot on my ankle that looked just like someone had dropped silver nitrate on it. It was perfectly even with the surrounding skin, and painless till after about 5 days the surface peeled off. Within a few hours it was really hurting so I used the electrodes from a "Beck Box" on either side, for about 10 minutes. The thing didn't bother me for a week, then it started hurting again, I ran the box longer and hotter and it went away after that. The secretary at the office where I'd borrowed the box used it twice when she had brown recluse bites. We have a Hulda Clark Zapper, but I don't think the voltage is high enough on it. It was not like my other bites, but was equally slow and was working it's way down through the layers.

Then my husband got bitten on the arm and he used his electroacupuncture gadget, grounding on one side of the bite and zapping on the other. A friend got bitten, had the classic nasty brown oozy wound on her leg, and as she had a TENS unit we simply put the pads on either side of the bite and turned it on blast for about 15 minutes. I forget how I treated the last two bites I got, they occurred about a week apart and I didn't let them got very far.
I introduced my chiropractor to the notion of treating recluse bites with his electrostim machine. I had a friend who'd been bitten 3X and had learned to use clay poultices morning and evening to heal them, but then she got a bite on her neck and after 6 days of poultices woke up to swollen glands in her neck and was scared. So that was the first one my DC got to use his machine on, and that was the end of the problem for her.

The one horror story I have witnessed was a friend who went to the dr the same day she was bitten, got on the antibiotics but they didn't do a thing. Her arm swelled up double, and when I heard about it 6 days later, I called immediately and told her to rush over to a DC who would use his electrostim on it. It had eaten a strip on her upper arm an inch wide, 5" long and about 1/8" deep. The wound stopped growing and healed up. She has a horrible scar, but it would certainly kept on eating to the bone had it not been stopped. There are 400 people where she works, they all know about what happened to her and believe me, they and all their friends and relatives will be going to a DC instead of an MD for TX.

The PT who did my 2nd bite told me about a guy who'd been bitten in a very delicate place. The MD's had nothing to offer except to cut out the bite area, which was not in a place where he thought he had anything to spare. The PT, on hearing his story, showed him how to use her machine and had him tow it to the restroom every time he came in for his other tx. She said it saved his marriage. (She also told me about saving her dog which had been snake bitten on a holiday weekend, she applied a TENS unit after he'd suffered for a couple of hours, in 20 minutes he was up dragging it around and wagging his tail. We just use Vit C for animals with snake bite, but we do have a TENS unit just in case. )

I talked with a nurse who works in a wound center, and she was astonished that I know about all these bite cases in which none of their debridement and other medical treatments were necessary. In fact, I was surprised to see that some people do know about the shock treatment. See http://en.allexperts.com/q/General-Surgery-2076/Brown-Recluse-Spider-Bites.htm which also mentions that the venom is "heat labile, calcium dependent, and optimally active at a pH of 7.1." They approved of a home remedy of hot and cold applications.

When I read all the things people have done for what they think are recluse bites, I have several thoughts. First of all, some of them were not recluse bites. I've been bitten my more kinds of bugs than most modern Americans. One thing that will show up in most recluse bites is a stage where there are two small holes, before they grow together and become one large hole. For a day or so after they combine, the hole is often square looking rather than round. Second, some actual recluse bites just got better, because of where the bites were, the person's good circulation and the assistance of salt to draw out toxins, of turmeric to reduce inflammation so the circulation could get in, etc. For example, an old man told me about how his little sister had developed a hole in her leg that ate all the way to the bone. In desperation, their dr had had their mother rip up and old sheet and fill little squares with Epsoms salts. When one was saturated, she pulled it out and stuffed another one in. That healed up the wound, which we can now guess was an early recluse bite. I don't think they were nearly as common before central heating. In my own case, salt and proteoplytic enzymes (in the meat tenderizer) and charcoal did not stop the progression of the bite. The next thing that would have happened to me was the big hot red area would have been undermined and collapsed. Only the electricity stopped it. I talked with a physiology professor about this, and he had two stories, people he knew personally who had stopped snakebite damage with electric shocks. He said that the proteolytic enzymes involved are very large complex molecules, positively charged at one end and negatively charged at the other end. When exposed to high voltage, low amperage current the ends are pulled in opposite directions and the enzymes are torn apart.

One last thing regarding infections being mistaken for spider bites. Anything that will draw out toxins via high osmotic pressure, such as salt or Epsoms salts, will also draw out the toxins from an infection. So those approaches are not contraindicated for MRSA. And if you will dig around a bit, you will find that Bob Beck invented his little box because of an accidental discovery that electrical current stopped bacterial growth in a petri dish. This info has been suppressed, but Bob Beck has put his invention into the public domain and does not sell the boxes so that he can tell people about it. You can find the plans and the boxes and the info online. And for flesh eating bacteria, they are using proteolytic enzymes that are surely similar to those used by recluse spiders and pit vipers, so electroshock may work on those cases too.