Home remedies · Skin, wounds & stings
No home remedy here replaces treatment, and none is talked down. What has done good for generations does good — even if no one ever measured it. Where something is well studied, it says so. Where it is only experience, it says that too.
Dip a cloth in cold water, wring it out and lay it on the itching spot for ten to fifteen minutes. Repeat as needed. A cold shower does the same over a larger area. Anything that keeps the skin cool helps too: light cotton, a cool room, no hot shower and no alcohol while it itches.
Weals arise when mast cells in the skin release histamine: the small vessels become leaky, fluid enters the tissue, and the nerve fibres that report itch are irritated. Cold attacks at two points. It narrows the vessels so that less fluid escapes — the weal flattens. And it occupies the same fine nerve fibres that carry the itch; the sensation of cold crowds out the sensation of itch for as long as it lasts. That is the same mechanism by which scratching briefly helps — without the damage scratching leaves behind.
No ice straight on the skin, always a cloth in between. With cold urticaria — the form in which cold itself sets the weals off — this is exactly the wrong thing; anyone who gets more weals after cold water rather than fewer stops. Cooling takes the itch away for as long as it is applied; it does not remove the cause, and hives that keep returning beyond six weeks are a matter of their own.
At once with swelling of the lips, tongue, throat or around the eyes, with breathlessness, tightness, nausea with faintness, or weals spreading over the whole body within minutes — that is no longer a skin matter. Also with weals plus fever, with single weals that stay for more than twenty-four hours or leave brown marks, and when it keeps coming back beyond six weeks.
See a doctor: wounds that gape, bleed heavily or are deep, bite wounds, burns larger than your own palm or with blisters on the face and joints. Likewise redness spreading quickly, especially with fever. And any mole that changes.