Medicinal clay

[1][2] The Ebers Papyrus of about 1550 BC (but containing the tradition going back many centuries earlier) is an important medical text from ancient Egypt.

Pliny reports about the Lemnian earth:[5] if rubbed under the eyes, it moderates pain and watering from the same, and prevents the flow from the lachrymal ducts.

It is used against complaints of the spleen and kidneys, copious menstruation, also against poisons, and wounds caused by serpents.Lemnian clay was shaped into tablets, or little cakes, and then distinctive seals were stamped into them, giving rise to its name terra sigillata—Latin for 'sealed earth'.

Galen... used as one of his means for curing injuries, festering wounds, and inflammations terra sigillata, a medicinal red clay compressed into round cakes and stamped with the image of the goddess Diana.

Ibn al-Baitar (1197–1248), a Muslim scholar born at Malaga, Spain, and author of a famous work on pharmacology, discusses eight kinds of medicinal earth.

In 1543, he visited Constantinople where, after making enquiries, he encountered 18 types of different products marketed as Lemnian Earth (he was concerned about possible counterfeits).

In 1588 the English ethnographer and translator Thomas Harriot wrote in A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia that Algonquians of the mid–Atlantic region of North America treated various sores and wounds with wapeih, "very like to terra sigillata" that English surgeons and physicians found to be of the same kind "of vertue and more effectuall" than the contemporary European sort.

[notes 3] Medicinal clay is typically available in health food stores as a dry powder, or in jars in its liquid hydrated state – which is convenient for internal use.

For external use, the clay may be added to the bath, or prepared in wet packs or poultices for application to specific parts of the body.

[notes 4] In the European health spas, the clay is prepared for use in a multitude of ways – depending on the traditions of a particular spa; typically it is mixed with peat and matured in special pools for a few months or even up to two years.

[26]Substances discontinued such as kaolin and attapulgite were formerly considered gastric demulcents and diarrhea medication, until official studies by the USFDA disproved these views.

Clays are classified as excipients and their main side-effects are that of neutral excipients, which is to impair and slow down absorption of antibiotics, hormones and heart medication amongst others by coating the digestive tract [27] and this slowed down absorption can lead to increased toxicity of some medication (e.g. citrate salts) which can become toxic if not metabolized quickly enough, which is one contraindication of attapulgite.

[28] Usual mild side-effects are nausea, slowed down absorption of nutrients from food (in excess dosage of medicinal clay) and constipation.