Rash Treatment and prevention
If you have been (or, think you may have been) exposed to poison oak or poison ivy plants, washing with a cleanser designed to remove urushiol (rash-causing oil from the plants) within 8 hours after exposure will help remove the resin before a rash begins.
There are two brands I swear by. Zanfel and Tecnu. Zanfel is expensive. At $50 for a small tube, I only use it after I get a rash. It has a gritty texture and really helps relieve the itch. After I've been in the yard doing things that may have exposed me, I always use the cheaper Tecnu. It's about $15 a tube and you get more of it. I wash everywhere with it. I mean, everywhere I may have touched.
https://teclabsinc.com/product/tecnu-extreme-poison-ivy-scrub/
Eradication
Poison ivy is a perennial. You have to kill it down to the roots.
Poison Ivy still has the urushiol oil on dry leaves. Urushiol WILL be carried in the smoke when it's burned. Urushiol is on the stems and roots, not just the leaves. It's less, but it's there. Don't burn poison ivy, you can wind up in the hospital. Don't pull it out, you will get it on you somehow.
To eradicate poison oak and poison ivy chemically, use an herbicide that contains glyphosate, triclopyr, or a 3-way herbicide that contains 2,4-D amine, dicamba, and mecoprop. Ortho GroundClear Poison Ivy & Tough Brush Killer works great. I hate poison sprays, since I'm a beekeeper, but I make an exception for poison ivy because it kills the plant down to the roots and it doesn't come back.
You can kill poison ivy without harsher chemicals by dissolving one cup of salt, one tablespoon of white vinegar, and one tablespoon of dish soap in a gallon of water. Spray it with a spray bottle. It may come back the next year with this method. Remember where it was so you can do it again.
I also like to use old rugs, tarps and cardboard to smother the plants. Leave them in place until there is nothing but bare dirt left. It may still come back.
You can also rent goats. Yes, goats. They love it. It may still grow back.
Hey y’all, YSK that applying heat to poison ivy rash provides total relief from itching for several hours. I get it ridiculously bad and so have had many unfortunate opportunities to experiment.
I’ve tried heat gun, hair dryers, nearby flames (!) but the easiest is hot water. Get water as hot as you can stand (you don’t need or want to actually burn yourself), and run it over or soak each rashy area for a few minutes. I often feel an intense wave of sensation at first, sometimes freakishly pleasurable (as if I were scratching the itch really hard).
You will be able to feel the exact area and edges of the rash; the sensation response is very distinct from adjacent areas of healthy skin. Make sure to gradually move your body and/or the water source to make sure you find the entire rash and get that heat soaked into all of it.
As you keep an area of rash exposed to the heat, the strong sensation will fade after a couple of minutes, leaving the rash-skin feeling specifically unresponsive to the heat, similar to numbness.
When you hit that point, where you no longer feel any sensation to the heat in the rash area you’re working on, you’re done. This reliably gives me 3-4 hours of complete relief from the itch.
Make sure you try other areas if you can, btw- If you’re doing this in the shower, you can effectively “scan” and treat your whole body for rashes big and small, since any affected patches of skin will leap out at you with their sensitivity to the heat. (I’ve even found that if a non-rash area has that big sensation response, it’s actually a “pre-rash” that is soon to erupt. But you can already feel the exact outlines of it under the heat.)
It seems like this treatment is reducing immune reaction in the area - and anecdotally appears to speed recovery and limit rash progression. But the relief from the infernal itch is worth it, regardless.
When you feel the itch returning, just repeat the same treatment. Try not to bump/touch the rashy areas, as that seems like it can make the itch return sooner.
This process is made easier if you can get your shower water hot enough, and just move around under the hot stream, or if you can soak in a very hot tub. But I’ve managed in a kitchen sink as well.
Hope that helps someone! It’s saved me from some incredible misery while enduring rash over much of my body.