The skin on the sole of your foot is the thickest on your whole body. Every cream you ever rubbed into that heel had to get through it first. Here is why none of them did.
Often the greatest change happens when someone becomes overly frustrated with the way things are, which pushes them to create something better.
Ralph Linford was 80 years old when he reached that point. He was an Australian engineer from a small country town called Elmore, and his rheumatoid arthritis had gotten bad enough that he could no longer lift his mug of beer. For an Australian man, that is a serious problem.
Ralph did not want a pharmaceutical-only path, so he went looking for another one. That search took him deep into the Australian outback, where he met an Aboriginal healer named Bardo.
Bardo introduced him to Blue Mallee eucalyptus, a rare strain with blue-tinted leaves that grows wild only in the outback. Aboriginal Australians had used it for generations for joint, muscle and nerve discomfort. It carries the highest cineole content of any eucalypt on the planet. That was the first piece.
It took years to find the other three, and longer still to get them to bind into a single oil. He did not sell it at first. He used it on his own hands and handed bottles to friends and family.
That is when something unexpected happened. His friends were not using it on their hands. One was a nurse who worked twelve-hour shifts and had started dreading the walk from the bed to the bathroom more than the shift itself. One rubbed it into the arch of a foot she could barely stand on before ten in the morning. One on a heel that had been through two pairs of custom orthotics and a cortisone shot.
Different bodies, different histories, same bottle. That told Ralph something important: he had not solved a hand problem. He had solved a delivery problem.
Most people dealing with a heel that will not settle down have a closet, not a drawer. Two pairs of inserts and a third still in the box. A night splint you wore twice. A frozen water bottle that lives in the freezer for exactly this. A tennis ball under the desk. New shoes you did not want to buy. A tube of menthol gel, a jar of something that smells like camphor, and calf stretches off a video that you did religiously for nine days.
Some of it bought a morning. None of it held. Ralph knew exactly why.
And the pattern is unmistakable once you have lived it. The first few steps out of bed are the worst of the entire day, every day, without exception. You take them on the outside of the foot, or on your toes, or holding the dresser. It loosens up after a few minutes of walking and you almost forget about it. Then you sit through a meeting or a car ride or a movie, stand up, and it is right back to where it was at six in the morning. By the end of a long day on your feet it has its own opinion about tomorrow.
So why does almost nothing get past the surface? Two reasons.
First, your skin is a barrier by design, and nowhere more than here. Most topical formulas are far too heavy to move through it, so they sit on top, feel like they are working because they are cold or warm, and evaporate. On the sole of a foot, they barely stand a chance.
Second, the ones that seem to work are working on the surface, not below it. Menthol and camphor rubs work by counter-irritation. They heat or freeze the skin so the nerve endings right at the surface have something else to pay attention to. When it fades, nothing underneath has changed. Same reason the frozen water bottle and the ice pack keep disappointing. Both stop the second you stand up.
And to say two things plainly. If a doctor or a physical therapist is managing your care, keep following their advice, keep doing the stretches and keep wearing the orthotics if you have been given them. Nothing on this page is a replacement for any of it. This is about the first steps out of bed, and the last hour of a long day standing.
Here is Mark Linford, Ralph's son and a partner in the business today, on his father's four ingredients and why each one earned its place.
“Every one of these was chosen for a job. Dad threw out far more than he kept.
Blue Mallee Eucalyptus. The rare outback strain Bardo pointed him to. It has the highest cineole content of any eucalypt on the planet, and the Aboriginal Australians relied on it for joint, muscle and nerve discomfort long before anyone put it in a bottle.
Australian Tea Tree. A hand-picked strain. Most people never think of tea tree for a heel, and there is a good reason for that. On its own it cannot get through the skin.
Vanilla. This is the one nobody expects, and it is the one that makes the whole thing work. It is a natural vasodilator. It opens the blood vessels at the surface so the eucalyptus and the tea tree can carry down through the skin instead of stopping at it.
Spanish Olive Oil. The carrier that binds the other three together. Dad tested 32 different olive oils before he found the one that made the formula hold.
Four oils. That is the entire label. No synthetics, no preservatives, and nothing that burns or freezes your skin.”
The real discovery was not the ingredient list. It was the timing. The four oils will not combine if you mix them at once. Each has to be added at a specific point in its own plant's maturation cycle. Working that out took Ralph years.
It is also why Outback is not a one-time fix. A counter-irritant gives you its best hour in the first ten minutes and less every time after. This works the other way around. The longer you use Outback Oil, the better it works.
Carried down past the surface, not parked on top of it.
To be clear, Outback is not a "plantar fasciitis product." It is a four-ingredient relief oil, and feet are simply where a very large number of people end up using it. Ralph built it for his hands. What his friends did with it turned out to be the bigger story.
It has sold over 2.1 million bottles worldwide, most of them in Australia, where it was sold as Elmore Oil and ended up carried in practically every pharmacy in the country. Not because of advertising, but because pharmacists kept having the same conversation with customers coming back for a second bottle. It was on the market there for more than ten years before it crossed to the United States in 2013.
And one thing worth saying plainly, because plenty of brands quietly change the formula when they cross an ocean: it is still blended in Australia. Ralph's eight-week triple maturation, timed to each plant's own cycle. The finished oil ships in tanks to the United States and is bottled here. The blend in your bottle is the blend Ralph built.
Read this part carefully, because we would rather be straight with you than impressive. The Outback Oil formula has been through two independent, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials. Both of them studied osteoarthritis. Neither of them studied plantar fasciitis. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
What they do tell you is that this is not an untested bottle of essential oils. At the Veterans Memorial Medical Centre in the Philippines, 60 patients used the formula and a matched placebo in turn over four weeks each, so every patient was their own control. On the active oil they reported a 73% reduction in nights of poor-quality sleep caused by discomfort, plus 38.9% fewer days of severe stiffness and a 33.3% drop in discomfort scores.
The second was a cross-over pilot at La Trobe University in Australia, on 11 adults, again each serving as their own control. The foot was among the areas included in that group, though as osteoarthritis rather than plantar fasciitis. It found statistically significant improvement from baseline in discomfort (p = 0.006) and stiffness (p = 0.019). Across all 71 patients in both trials, the formula was found safe and well tolerated, with no significant changes in liver, kidney or blood markers.
Both studies were run on the same formula sold today as Outback Original Oil, known in Australia as Elmore Oil. Both studied osteoarthritis patients, not plantar fasciitis patients. The La Trobe authors noted that improvement was not universal. Individual results vary.
We asked Mark how Outback works without the ingredients almost every other topical on the shelf is built around. He laughed. “Because those are the ingredients that made Dad go looking in the first place.”
Outback has a natural vanilla and eucalyptus scent that does not linger, and it will not have your bedroom smelling like a locker room when you put it on before bed. The ingredients are safe, non-habit-forming and drug-free.
Pills and powders have to be digested first, which takes hours, and you get no say in where they end up. Why put an entire body through it when the trouble is under one heel?
Outback goes exactly where you put it. Roll it across the heel, along the arch, over the ball of the foot, and up into the calf, which is usually just as tight and rarely gets any attention. Rub it in, wipe away the excess. About thirty seconds, and it will not leave you sticky or greasy on the sheets.
One practical note that matters more here than anywhere. Most people do it twice. Once at night before bed, and once sitting on the edge of the mattress in the morning before those first steps rather than after them. Keep the bottle on the nightstand, not in the bathroom cabinet, or the morning application is the one you will skip.
“It has helped me tremendously with my plantar fasciitis. I honestly did not think it would work as I've tried everything.”
“I love this product! It has helped me tremendously with my plantar fasciitis. I honestly did not think it would work as I've tried everything. But, it did indeed did the trick. I used it for less than a week and I noticed the difference.”
“I've bought a lot of stuff that doesn't work but the outback oil does help my feet. I have plantar fasciitis and this oil really helps get the oils into my heels.”
“I have neuropathy, plantar faciatis and Morton's Neuroma & needed relief. My Outback roll on has been a tremendous help to my feet especially at night. Thank you!”
“It works great on my husbands plantar fasciitis”
“I think it works!!! My plantar fasciitis is better.”
Individual results vary.
Outback is one of the only companies in America that does not ask you to send the product back. You have 365 days to get a full refund, and you keep the bottle. If Outback doesn't help you find relief, it is on us.
To get the word out, a limited number of first-time customers can buy a full-size Outback Oil Roll-On and get a Free Outback 7-Day Pack. Each sachet in the 7-Day Pack holds a towelette with 3mL of Outback Oil.
The 7-Day Pack is more than a free add-on. This oil rewards consistency, so the thing most likely to stop it working for you is the day you are away from the bottle. A sachet fits in a work bag, a locker or a glove box, which is exactly where you want one halfway through a twelve-hour shift.
Don't worry, this is not a subscription. You will never be auto-billed. Most people do end up using it daily, because the longer you use it the better it works, and that only happens if you keep using it. Either way you are covered by the 365-day guarantee.
One last thing so the next page makes sense: you will see this called Outback Original Roll-On. Same formula, same bottle. It is named after what is in it, not after a body part, which is why the thank-you letters come from so many different conditions.
If you're ready to put both feet flat on the floor in the morning and just stand up, without the dresser, without the wall, and without taking the first ten steps on the outside of your foot, enter your email below to claim your offer and see how it works for yourself.
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*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Results not typical. Individual results may vary.
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