1. Skin cells are composed of stratified epithelial tissue, very similar to the human digestive tract.
2. Skin cells require nourishment with nutrients that are useful to the cells, either as fuel or as structural material.
3. Skin cells require the drainage/removal of waste products produced by cellular metabolism or internal/external toxicity from food, water, air, or skin/scalp contact.
4. Therefore the absolute best way to achieve natural good healthy skin is to give it good nerve supply, lymphatic drainage, and a good clean nutrient-rich and healthy blood supply, while avoiding toxic chemical exposure.
5. The human skin is absorbent, just like the digestive tract, and therefore substances placed onto the human skin penetrate into the underlying tissues and eventually contact the blood where they circulate through vital organs. Herbalists have used this to advantage in the form of foot and hand baths for many years. Nicotine patches also work for this reason, and can provoke acute toxicity effects in people when overused for the same reason.
6. Substances placed on the skin can be grouped into three broad categories:
(i) inert - not absorbable through the skin, not useful to human cells, non-toxic
(ii) nutritive - useful to human cells for either nourishment or fuel
(iii) toxic - not useful to human cells for either nourishment or fuel, and requiring either detoxification, or toxin-binding and static cellular storage to prevent them from circulating and causing ongoing damage.
The result of this static storage is localized intercellular toxicity, potentially predisposing to cellular changes like carcinogenesis, and teratrogenesis. Toxins that undergo this type of storage are cumulative and build up over the years.
7. Millions of years of human cell evolution, exposure, and natural selection, has produced cells with a certain set of biological processes and capacities. Hence, exposure to certain groups of natural chemicals for many generations of humans and human cells has resulted in an excellent capacity to deal competently with these natural chemicals. The comparatively new wave of toxic chemicals in recent millennia/centuries, very recently often derived from material leftover from the petrochemical industry (imagine the waste disposal fees they can save paying when they can sell it as a product ingredient instead of paying for sealed landfill space!), are foreign to human cells. Enzyme pathways, and detoxification mechanisms do not exist for many or perhaps any of these, and it has been reported that toxicity effects from simultaneous multiple toxin exposure seem to be greater and more complex than the sum of many single toxin exposures owing to interactive and other effects.
8. In short, natural health advocates often say, very simply:
"IF YOU WOULDN'T EAT IT, DON'T PUT IT ON YOUR SKIN."
Whilst this may be slightly oversimplified, it is correct in essence.
9. Extremely short-term exposures to pure simple soaps (fat + alkali salt, e.g. olive oil + salts in wood ashes = castille soap) seem harmless.
10. Your scalp is part of your skin, your digestive tract is your inner skin, and your mouth, gums, tongue, eyes, sexual organ membranes, and conjunctiva are all also absorbent tissues made of very similar cells.
11. The transit of toxic chemicals through the skin surface into the body has been dubbed TRANSDERMAL POISONING, causing TRANSDERMAL TOXICITY, and occurs in both acute and chronic/cumulative forms.
12. Toxicity is a primary causative factor of disease in humans. To recover from illness or aspire to health, it is prudent to remove wherever possible any known sources of toxicity and harm from one's environment/lifestyle.
13. It is therefore prudent as an act of personal responsibility to carefully scrutinise what substances the surfaces of your body come into contact with. This includes all dental materials, hard soaps, liquid soaps, massage oils, dishwashing detergents (residue on dishes and hands), clothes-washing powders/liquids/dyes (residues on clothes), synthetic fibres (clothes and other), paints, stains, woodfinishes, cosmetics, shaving creams, deodorants, perfumes, shampoos, conditioners, lip balms, lip sticks, moisturizers, scrubs, toothpastes, tooth powders, mouthwashes, mascara,suncreams, skin creams, waxes, hair products, hair gels,body and footpowders, insect repellants, bathing water (can contain volatile chlorine and many other chemicals), bubble baths, bath salts, foot powders, body powders, foundation, make-up, spray/paste-on tans, bodywrap products, spa products, linaments, balms, poultices, compresses, tampons, sexual lubricants, sexual aids, Teflon cookware, food chemical additives, aluminium cookware, anticaking agents in commercially produced salt, and all other products used in internal or external body applications or that come into contact with living human cells.
14. Practitioners of natural and traditional medicine should carefully consider the code of ethics of their membership organisation. It usually contains a derivative of a sentiment from the Hippocratic Oath: "First do no harm." Practitioners should do their best to ensure that they do not breach this code of ethics by using toxic chemicals on their clients, or coercing clients to use them on themselves. Herbalists who make creams for their clients should avoid any petrochemicals or other toxic chemicals in the bases or other ingredients of their creams (Some say sorbalene fitsinto this category).
15. As a duty of care towards their customers and employees, all practitioners, employees, and businesses involved in marketing/producing/using/encouraging the use of products (and giving/encouraging treatments with these products), which contact human skin or tissue, would be wise to openly disclose to their customers and employees, and fellow employees, all the ingredients of these products, indicate anything reasonably known or suspected about their toxicity levels and cumulative toxicity effects, and obtain educated and informed consent from each and every customer and employee on each and every treatment/sale, with each and every product. Failure to do so could be viewed legally as a breach of duty of care or worse, and could incur significant legal liability. Class action suits are a possibility.
16. These toxins, after being applied to living human tissues, are washed into our sewers and water treatment facilities, and eventually leach and travel into the ground water and contaminate streams, estuaries, water catchments, the ocean and all its inhabitants, the polar ice cap and northern indigenous tribespeople, and eventually and potentially every being on the planet, cumulatively, through air and water movement patterns.
Perhaps the manufacturers and promoters of such products would like to ask permission of each and every planetary citizen and whether they mind?
17. If it be decided by a business or practitioner, after toxicity concerns are raised or toxicity information is offered, to continue using, promoting, and selling toxin-containing products and treatments with these toxin-containing products, this may be legally hazardous, and morally wrong. At the very least, it may be wise to obtain educated and informed consent, and offer an alternative completely non-toxic range of products as an option for each and every product known to contain toxins, for each and every employee, for each and every client, and for each and every treatment.
18. So what can you do?
BEWARE OF THOSE WHO WOULD PROFIT FROM YOUR IGNORANCE OR APATHY
- Beware of false assurances in product advertising.
- Avoid toxic chemicals as much as you can.
- Don't assume anything is safe without first checking it thoroughly and assiduously. If someone wants you to buy or use a product, or wants you to buy a service from them that uses a product, and they haven't made this process of checking easy, ask them why they haven't. Ask to see the labels and ingredients of every product that anyone wants to use on you or sell you, and ask the salesperson, administration, and company owners what they are, where they come from, and how toxic they are. Read every product label, and every ingredient. Research every ingredient for yourself, if you don't know what it is, and find out why it is there, where it comes from, and how toxic it is.
- Supply a copy of this information to the person who wanted you to buy or use their product.
BELIEVE YOU CAN DO ALL THIS FOR YOURSELF. TAKE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND DON'T HAND OVER YOUR HEALTH TO THOSE WHO WOULD PROFIT FROM YOUR IGNORANCE, APATHY, OR SELF-DOUBT.
- Make your blood, healthy, clean, and well-nourished.
- Improve your blood circulation using natural techniques.
- Help your body detoxify.
- Write letters to companies asking why they are selling or producing toxic petrochemicals and other chemicals for people to use on their skin. Copy and distribute this document far and wide. Use it to teach friends, family, aquaintances, employees, employers, and other people about the dangers of transdermal poisoning.
- Collect literature about this topic from health magazines and anywhere else, and spread awareness of this wherever you can. (Email it to me!)
- Some companies justify their continued sale and production of these products by saying that it is legal and they are just supplying legitimate consumer demand. (Cigarettes carry warning stickers. Who cares about the environment or the consumers health!) Remove this consumer demand, vote with your money, and only support those companies which avoid toxic chemicals completely. There are a number of these companies in existence now, some with certified organic ingredients.
TRANSDERMAL POISONING MUST STOP!
Respectfully submitted,
by Kyle Grimshaw-Jones, email: kyle@winshop.com.au
B.App.Sc.(TCM), Dip.App.Sc.(Nat), N.D., R.T.
Whitsunday S.A.F.E. Health Centre, 07 4948 1118
Ground Floor Cannonvale Court, 44 Coral Esplanade, Cannonvale, Qld,
4802 Australia.
Copyright August 15th 2005
The author reserves all rights to this document. It may be reproduced and distributed, but only if copied in its entirety and not modified.
It may not be sold except for the minimal cost incurred by printing.
