Emu Oil Helps Stimulate Hair and Skin Growth

Excerpts from "Emu Oil: Reexamining a Natural Remedy With Today's Technology"

Michael Holick, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Medicine, Physiology, and Dermatology at Boston University School of Medicine, conducted a study involving processed emu oil, and the results were so outstanding that they quickly became a topic of conversation in many medical and other journals.

Dr. Holick revealed that he and his associates had been very interested in looking at factors that stimulate and inhibit both skin and hair growth...

"They had told me about the wondrous things that it's doing, at least from the folklore of the Aboriginal people and also from their own anecdotal experience. My feeling was that the only way to really know whether or not this oil has some biologic property was to do a control study in a laboratory setting..."

"We found that there was about a 20% increase in the proliferative activity, or the growth activity of the skin in the animals... " said Dr. Holick. "And when we looked at the hair follicles, and the thickness of the skin, it showed that the hair follicles were much more robust, and that the skin thickness was remarkably increased, suggesting... the stimulation of skin growth and hair growth in these animals. Also, we discovered in the same test that over 80% of hair follicles that had been asleep were woken up, and began growing hair."

"A hair follicle goes through a cycle. It goes from a resting stage into an active growth period, and then it goes back to sleep again. We woke up all the hair follicles by stimulating them, and then we wanted to see if we could further stimulate these hair follicles by topically applying emu oil. We found that there was an enhancement in the growth activity of the hair follicles. So it gives us a very good scientific indication that we were stimulating skin growth," Dr. Holick elaborated.

Some more information from the same book mentioned above:

According to an article by Dr. Michael F. Holick and James F. Kinney appearing in Drug & Cosmetic Industry magazine in January of 1996, Dr. Holick and his colleagues have been interested in developing new products that will specifically enhance skin and hair growth. It was asserted that the "ideal topical moisturizer that would help aging skin should have the ability to help reverse skin dryness and scaling by enhancing the ability of the skin's upper layers to hold on to water. If the product could also penetrate into the epidermis and stimulate epidermal growth to rejuvenate its rete ridges and could enhance the thickness of the dermis, this product would be ideally suited to help the ravages of skin aging."

The article notes that additional research s needed to determine whether the effects that were seen in mice are equally applicable to humans."