Vaginal Garlic: The Spooky Reality

All tricks and no treats

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Do you have a problem with vampires? If the answer is no, you don’t need vaginal garlic. And if you do have a problem with vampires, the answer is still no because the best place for your garlic is around your neck because that’s where they bite!

Jokes aside, I thought Halloween was a great time to debunk what is a close contest for the worst piece of vaginal “advice” that you can find both on the Internet and in print: vaginal garlic. 

If you are crossing your legs and things, “Ouch,” or “Holy hell,” or “Motherf*cker,” you are not wrong. Garlic can indeed burn, and the idea of garlic on inflamed vaginal tissues is…unpleasant.

Before we go any further, people do things like put garlic in their vagina not because they are randomly trying groceries for vaginal concerns, but rather because trusted sources told them it was a valid therapy. There is motley crew of functional doctors, midwives, naturopaths, and functional nutritionists that recommend vaginal garlic. Here are two examples. The first is a poorly referenced article on Midwifery Today (no links, because I’m not providing traffic).

And here is a screenshot from a recent version of “Our Bodies Ourselves,” the basis is, of course, anecdote.

I mean, if someone said that a Coca-Cola douche cleared their yeast infection, would that mean theses sources would recommend vaginal Coca-Cola as real vaginal magic?

The answer is, of course, not, or at least probably not, or at least, I hope not. 

So let’s be clear, women are often desperate because they can’t see a qualified provider who can help them and they are being told by people they trust that anecdotes trump medicine.

Using vaginal garlic ties into two fallacies. The first is an appeal to tradition. Old-time doctors/midwives/healers must have hidden knowledge, so if they used vaginal garlic, it must have been a good therapy and worthy of use today. Also, at work here is the “natural” fallacy, meaning as garlic is found in nature, it must be healing. 

WOMEN DESERVE MORE THAN MEDICAL CARE BY FALLACY.

Sorry, I needed express my incandescent rage, 

There is a huge problem with lifting an ancient therapy and claiming it as valuable today. The concept of a vaginal yeast infection was unknown to the ancients. Disease models were different, and their proposed cures only make sense in the context of how they believed the human body worked, and many of those cures don’t make sense today, given what we know. Case in point, the ancient Greeks believed a tube connected the mouth to the vagina. One use of garlic was placing it in the vagina, and if the next day the woman could smell garlic in her mouth, the tube was open, and she could get pregnant. Eating garlic was recommended to treat “displacement of the womb,” a term that has no modern equivalent, and vaginal garlic pessaries were supposed to “create a wind in the womb,” which sounds like the little known sequel to The Wind in the Willows, but was a therapy that was believed to increase the chances of pregnancy or cause an abortion or who knows, because interpreting the texts is hard and not everyone gets it right. Also, we don’t always know what was meant by these ancient terms. 

There is nothing in these ancient texts that suggests we should be using garlic for vaginal yeast infections. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, women deserve science, not mythology. How often do you see supposed recipes from Hippocrates offered for men to treat an enlarged prostate or erectile dysfunction? Right. 

I suspect garlic stuck around in the vaginal medical lexicon because it’s stinky, which gives it the illusion of doing something medicinal. We know brightly colored placebos are more effective than those that are white or dull in color, so it’s clear that theatrics improves outcomes, at least temporarily. Garlic is also astringent, meaning it dries tissues, and ancient medical practices in many cultures revolved around achieving balance, which was often about fluids, so products that dried tissues or were believed to dry tissues were commonly used. For example, the ancient Greeks believed women were overly moist, meaning every cell in a woman’s body was too wet as women could not control the balance of their fluids. While astringents were commonly used in general to achieve balance, they were often preferentially used for women, because women were soggy sponges with defective plumbing. And, of course, a wet vagina has been a bad vagina for centuries, a mistaken sign of previous sexual knowledge and hence “damage.” So a good vagina was a dry vagina, meaning astringents were especially common in vaginal therapies for women’s health. 

Ancient Therapies May Be Worth Studying

Many people claim that big Pharma is against remedies that can be found in nature, but it’s not true, because they actively look at plants as sources of medical therapies. Plants have many chemicals that can be valuable, or that are dangerous but can be purified or used in a medically meaningful way. The chemotherapy drug paclitaxel originally came from the bark of the Pacific Yew tree. Ergotamine is made by a fungus that grows on rye. Penicillin comes from mold. No one is ignoring the plant kingdom as a source of medications, but ingredients typically need to extracted and purified so specific doses can be used and to ensure safety and efficacy. 

It’s not unbelievable that ancient practitioners had some remedies that worked. After all, if you are a student of the scientific method and try things, and keep the things that appear to work and discard others, an effective remedy may be found. For example, this is the origin of ergotamine. And a few years ago, a group of researchers reconstructed a 1,000-year-old remedy of onion, garlic, wine, and bile salts, known as ‘Bald’s eyesalve’, and found that it had anti-biofilm properties (something that could be useful in treating some bacteria and yeast). However, none of the researchers were suggesting we start using it in medicine, the conclusion was we need to research this further to understand if it has value.

Can Garlic Treat a Vaginal Yeast Infection?

In a word, NO. There is not one credible publication supporting this treatment, so there’s that. 

Garlic contains an inactive substance called alliin, and cutting or crushing it releases the enzyme alliinase, which converts alliin into allicin, which gives garlic its aroma. Allicin has anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties in laboratory studies, meaning in a test tube or petri dish.

However, if I poured Coca-Cola into a petri dish, it might also be a yeast killer. meaning, it’s important not to get carried away with in vitro (lab) studies. We can’t recommend a therapy until it has been tested in humans and found to be both safe and effective (and preferably also the active ingredient has been identified with certainty and the dose can be standardized). People skipping ahead to vaginal garlic must not think women deserve any scientific rigor.  

The only credible study looking at garlic for yeast evaluated an oral supplement and measured yeast in the vagina, so it was not specifically for treating a yeast infection, it was part of the background work that would be needed to start exploring the subject. The objective was to see if a garlic supplement when taken by mouth could reduce the amount of yeast present in the vagina. It did not. It’s a smaller, exploratory study, and the authors should be commended for publishing it even though the results were negative. 

What is the Harm?

We have no idea how garlic affects the balance of bacteria and yeast in the vagina, and the assumption should not be that it is beneficial. Foreign bodies allow bacteria to grow, and can be associated with vaginal infections. Could vaginal garlic increase the risk of toxic shock syndrome? Who knows!? Not exactly reassuring.

People who recommend vaginal garlic (and you should really avoid medical advice from those people) recommend one of three approaches. Let’s look at them so you can see how ridiculous and potentially harmful they are, understanding that we don’t know how much allicin is in a clove of garlic or if it is even effective!  

1. Stuff the whole clove up. The issue here is garlic needs to be cut or crushed to release the allicin. Basically, a clove of garlic is just a bacterial starter for the vagina. Not recommended. 

2. Pierce the garlic and use thread or dental floss as a string for removal, like a garlic tampon. Again, how much allicin is released? Likely none. What thread? Can it cause the growth of the toxin in toxic shock syndrome (TSS), because we know some threads absolutely do that. Not recommended.

3. Crush the garlic and wrap it in a gauze and stuff it up and hope the little bits of garlic don’t leave the gauze and actually touch the vagina. Some concerns are A) how are you getting that out without leaving rogue bits of garlic behind to irritate? B) is there really enough allicin to permeate a gauze and then seep from the gauze to the vagina? and C) there are many case reports of crushed garlic causing serious irritation and even burns to the skin. These burns happen when the garlic is wrapped under a dressing in an attempt to treat or prevent an infection. Can a gauze that potentially compresses garlic against the vagina walls have this effect? Unknown. Garlic is an astringent, and it is irritating, and while I’ve not seen a burn per se, I’ve seen some very red, painful vaginas because of vaginal garlic. This image which was shared by some vaginal garlic aficionado on Twitter in defense of vaginal garlic (I know, right?) really sums up the experience. Inflammation.

Vaginal garlic is a romanticization of ancient therapies, and those who recommend it must think women don’t deserve quality medical care. I honestly think if I could transport back 1,000 years and show women a fluconazole tablet (oral treatment for a yeast infection) and explain how it worked, they’d be truly horrified that people were still resorting to what amount to folk remedies. 

Promoting completely unstudied, potentially harmful care as a treatment option is not medicine, it’s misogyny.  

References

King Helen. Hippocrates Women. Routledge, 1998. 

Furner-Pardoe, J., Anonye, B.O., Cain, R. et al. Anti-biofilm efficacy of a medieval treatment for bacterial infection requires the combination of multiple ingredients. Sci Rep 2020;10:12687.

Marchese, A. et al. Antifungal and antibacterial activities of allicin: A review. Trends Food Sci. Technol 2016;52:49–56.

Lanzotti, V., Bonanomi, G. & Scala, F. What makes Allium species effective against pathogenic microbes? Phytochem Rev 2013;12:751–772.

Watson CJ, Grando D, Fairley CK, Chondros P, Garland SM, Myers SP, Pirotta M. The effects of oral garlic on vaginal candida colony counts: a randomised placebo controlled double-blind trial. BJOG. 2014 Mar;121(4):498-506.