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Please read our Golden Rules of self help before considering the information on this page.
Eczema
Eczema is due to many varied causes and it needs individual treatment. In my clinic I may have a run of eczema patients who will respond brilliantly to a similar treatment and just as the thought occurs that I am definitely a genius, one patient will not respond to any treatment at all. How annoying!
In Chinese medicine it is said that if the parent has asthma, the child will have eczema. Twenty years of practise have demonstrated to me that this is indeed an interesting phenomenon. Not all children of asthmatic parents have eczema, but a lot of children with eczema have asthmatic parents. It is also very interesting to note many children whose parents smoke also suffer from eczema. Indeed, a lot of smokers suffer from assorted types of dermatitis.
Infantile eczema is often the direct result of allergic reaction to milk in bottle fed babies. I have seen babies who have been changed from one formula to another without any success for the simple reason that the baby keeps on reacting to each new formula. And it is not just cow's milk which is the culprit, the soy formulae are guilty as well. In this case it is important to repair the gastro-intestinal tract. The way you do this is :
- Adding bifidus and acidophilus to the formula.
- Preparing formula bottles with Chamomile tea or Nettles tea instead of water.
As I said before there are many causes for eczema, this is why it is important to work individually with a naturopath or a herbalist when you want to treat this problem with natural methods. These sorts of treatments will include a clean wholesome diet free of irritants such as sugar, coffee and alcohol as well as individual prescription for herbal medicines.
When you attend to eczema topically, however it is important to consider which stage you are at. There are two stages in eczema: the acute, hot, angry, weeping state and the chronic, dry, scaly state. It is important to use different remedies at different times. The old adage "do not pour oil on fire" applies here, do not use oily ointment at the angry stage: for this you must use water based creams, such as aqueous cream, with water based herbal extract in them:
- Chickweed cream is an old stand-by which works very well. It is important at this stage to keep applying the ointment in order to keep the skin moist, even if it is weeping.
Remember: during the fire you want water, so you have to keep the skin moist. Sometimes this type of treatment seems to aggravate the skin but if there is no oil in the ointment it will only be for a short time. Even applying compresses on the skin and removing them as soon as they dry will work. Good old Chamomile tea is one of the herbs you can use for compresses, the other thing you can use and which we saw a few weeks ago is the old vinegar bath: one cup of white vinegar to one litre of water.
When the fire is over and you are left with a devastated landscape now is the time to use oily healing ointments, Even plain Apricot Kernel oil will help, Comfrey ointment and Calendula ointments will help repair the skin. If there are still some red patches, in skin folds for instance, keep the oil away from these and treat them as acute.
A word on cortico-steroids drugs. They are miraculous in the instantaneous relief they afford, however we should all be aware of the long-term effect of the use of steroids. Also, the skin quickly becomes habituated to this treatment and soon no longer responds.
It is handy to have cortico-steroid creams at hand for the times when very severe bouts of itching want to make you tear your skin to ribbons. But only use it when it is really needed rather than as a routine.
Doing this while you are attending to the cause of the problem, and treating the skin with natural remedies, will insure that you get the best of both worlds: the eczema is being treated, the crisis times have a back up and there is no build up of dangerous drugs.
For a personalised treatment please contact me here.
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The information on this website is not intended to provide personal medical advice, which should be obtained from a medical professional.
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