Treating Conjunctivitis- Pink Eye Naturally and Cheaply With Olive Leaf Tea

I hate pink eye. It's gross looking, uncomfortable, and highly contagious. If you've never had the "privilege" of having pink eye (officially known as conjunctivitis), it's when your eyes start oozing yellowish pus and the eye looks blood shot, and usually under the eye is either puffy or discolored or both. (If you want to see some nasty pictures of what pink eye looks like, if you're still not sure what I'm talking about, click here.) If you have pink eye, you may find your eyes glued/crusted shut from all the pus. And worst of all, if you touch one eye that has pink eye, and don't wash your hands very well after, and then touch another eye after, that new eye will likely get infected as well. Pink eye passes from one eye to the other and from person to person easily. Even when treating pink eye, you need to treat each eye separately so as to not potentially pass the infection back and forth...
(I am pretty sure kids are more likely to get pink eye than adults, but I don't know this for certain.)

Anyhow, now after that long, icky introduction, I just had to say that my little Anneliese developed a case of pink eye. So gross to look at, made her look so pitiful.
Some people rush to the doctor to get medicine for pink eye immediately, because it is highly contagious, but I never do that. I don't think, in my 6+ years of parenting, and more than one case of pink eye, that I've ever treated pink eye with medicine from the doctor. And that's because natural remedies simply work so well, and are safer and much cheaper to boot.

If you're nursing and have breastmilk, breastmilk treats pink eye very well. It has antibacterial and antiviral and other healing properties- when my babies had pink eye that was all I ever used and it went away.
Couldn't do that for Anneliese, though, because though I am still nursing her, I don't really have any milk left, can't use it for healing things. So I had to figure out an alternative.
I had heard of using black tea bags to treat conjunctivitis, but I had no personal experience with it, and I decided I wanted to try something else, something cheaper that would probably be more effective- olive leaf tea.


We have many olive trees growing around, so we can get olive leaves easy and for free. (But if you can't get them free, you can buy them online, in places like this). I thought to try to use olive leaves to heal her pink eye because of olive leaf's amazing medicinal properties, among which is the fact that it is antibacterial, antiviral and anti microbial in general. Since pink eye can be caused either from a virus or a bacteria, using olive leaf tea to cure it hits two birds with one stone.

To make the tea, simply boil a bunch of olive leaves in water for a few minutes. You can also pour boiling water onto the leaves and let it seep, but it is less strong that way.

To use it to cure pink eye, just dip cotton balls in the olive leaf tea, and wipe the eye with it (and squeeze some of the tea into the eye if you can). Use separate cotton balls for each eye (because of the reasons I mentioned above) and repeat a few times a day.
I found after just one application, the eye got much better, and after a few it was completely gone.

I highly recommend this treatment for pink eye.

(P.S. My daughter cried when I applied it, so I was afraid it was stinging her eyes, so I tried it out on myself- doesn't hurt at all. She just doesn't like people touching her eyes.)

And if you, fortunately, don't have pink eye, olive leaf tea is great for so many other ways. We drink it on a regular basis just as our drink (diluted a bit, without sugar) instead of water, either cold or hot. It tastes like green tea, and is good for so many things. Not only for healing viral or bacterial illnessess like colds, the flu, etc... but also as a preventative. Since we started drinking olive leaf tea regularly, we find we don't get sick as often, even when we think we might. (Some times we feel our throat getting scratchy- drink two cups of olive leaf tea, and feel better in the morning...)
Olive leaf tea is also helpful for people with heart issues, such as cholesterol, high blood pressure, etc...
It also has 4 times as many antioxidants in it as green tea...
I mix olive leaves with black tea to make olive leaf kombucha, which makes olive leaf tea even more healing, since kombucha is also very healing for the body. (For a mason jar of kombucha, I usually do one black tea bag, and the rest of the tea olive leaf.)
(In case you were wondering, my research showed up that olive leaf tea is totally fine for pregnancy.)
I've also been known to throw in some olive leaf tea in various things I'm cooking, like soups, etc... and no one can tell the difference...

Anyhow, I just had to share about this wonderful treatment for pink eye and so many other things.

Have you ever heard of olive leaves being medicinal? Have you ever used olive leaves, either medicinally or just as a frugal drink? 
What do you do to treat pink eye? What do you find is most effective?