My doctor was a cardiac surgeon before he was my doctor. He spent years at the end of the game with patients who were already in crisis, and at some point he decided he did not want to do that anymore. Not because the work was not important, but because he kept thinking about how many of those people he could have helped if he had gotten to them sooner. So he walked away from cardiac surgery and spent the rest of his career practicing functional medicine. He has since passed, and I think about him more than he probably expected anyone would. He was the one who first told me to look at castor oil.
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I was working through some significant health issues at the time, thyroid problems, autoimmune inflammation, gut motility that had slowed down to a pace that was causing real problems. He was methodical about it, always looking for the simplest effective intervention before reaching for anything more aggressive. Castor oil kept coming up. He recommended packs on my neck for the thyroid, on my abdomen for gut inflammation, and on my knee, which has had my ACL replaced and repaired more times than I care to count, whenever the joint flared up. The mechanism behind all of it was the same: a fatty acid called ricinoleic acid that makes up the majority of castor oil's composition and has documented anti-inflammatory properties. It absorbs through the skin and gets into the tissue. That is the short version and it is enough to understand why the applications make sense.
What I did not expect was my voice.
I have had issues with my vocal cords my entire life. Inflammation, cysts, the kind of chronic roughness that becomes so familiar you stop noticing it until someone else points it out. Every year, like clockwork, I would lose my voice badly enough that my doctor would put me on ten days of complete radio silence. No talking at all. My family, to their great credit, was never once upset about this. Not even a little. I will let you draw your own conclusions about what that says.
Since I started using castor oil consistently, I have not lost my voice. I want to be careful here because I cannot prove the connection and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But here is what I know: I was not doing anything else new, and the timing lines up. What I have come to believe is that when you are trying to address one specific thing, you sometimes get benefits you were not looking for and do not even notice right away because you were watching somewhere else. You are trying to improve your gut motility and one day you realize your voice has been fine for months. That kind of thing. It happens more than we give it credit for.
I eventually started using castor oil on my face as well, which grew out of the same thinking. I was looking at everything coming into contact with my body and asking whether it needed to be there. The expensive facial products I had been buying for years did not survive that question. I filled a rose quartz roller bottle with straight castor oil and started rolling a thin layer across my face most nights before bed, eyebrows and lashes included. Most nights. There are nights I forget, and those nights happen, and then I remember the next night and keep going. That is the whole system.
About three months after I had switched, I went in for a facial. My facialist made a point of telling me my skin had never looked better, that whatever products I had been using were really working, and that she had even noticed my lashes and brows had thickened up. I let her finish. Then I told her I had stopped using all of those products. That my face routine was now essentially one ingredient. She was quiet for a moment. Then complimentary. She doesn't make the products, so she didn't take it personally. (I suspect she may have tried it afterwards, but I'll never know for sure...)
The packs themselves took a little more figuring out. My first castor oil pack was chosen almost entirely based on one requirement: do not let this stuff get on anything I care about. Castor oil is thick, it stains, and it does not apologize for either. What I did not think about at the time was what the pack itself was made of, and what my skin was absorbing from it while I was busy absorbing the castor oil. Once I started paying attention to that, I switched to an organic cotton flannel liner, a larger one for my abdomen and knee, and a smaller for my neck. I place it between the oil and my skin, and kept the original wrap just to hold everything in place and protect my sheets. The wrap does its job. The flannel is what touches me.
I just ordered a new pack that includes specific inserts for just about any place you want to use castor oil, which is something I had not seen before and immediately wanted. I am heading out on vacation in a few days, and if history is any guide, I will come back inflamed from the travel and the disruption to my routine. I am genuinely looking forward to putting that new pack to work when I get home. Which is maybe a strange thing to look forward to, but here we are.
One time, during a stretch where my inflammation had become significant enough that my joints felt like something close to rheumatoid arthritis, my doctor had me take a very small oral dose of castor oil for a short period. I only did it once. I have not had inflammation reach that level since, and I genuinely cannot tell you exactly what the dose was because I have not needed to revisit it. What I can tell you is that it worked, and that I was doing several things at once to address what was happening in my body, so I am not going to hand all the credit to any one of them.
Hair was not something I was thinking about when I started down the castor oil road, but it found its way in eventually. I mix it with coconut oil and massage it into my scalp once a week, usually early in the day so it has several hours to sit before I wash it out. And I will warn you right now, washing castor oil out of your hair is a commitment. Your arms will know they did something. What I have noticed is not thickening, I want to be straight about that, but the shedding has reduced significantly. For someone who was finding more hair in the drain than felt reasonable, that matters. It has been a few months of doing it consistently and that part of the routine has earned its place right alongside everything else.
What castor oil has become for me is a foundational part of how I manage inflammation, and inflammation is the thread that runs through most of what I am dealing with. The thyroid. The gut. The knee. The vocal cords, maybe. It is not a cure. It is not a replacement for working with a good doctor. It is one tool that has earned its place in my apothecary, and that is exactly the standard everything in here has to meet.
From The Field: The thing worth paying attention to is rarely just one thing. Pull one thread and watch what else comes with it.
This is what we use and what works for us. It is not medical advice, just lived experience. Start small, use good sense, and do what is right for you.