Rare Rash Relief! (My Experience of Eczema)

Member Name: skidd

Product:	My Experience of Eczema
Date:	13/09/07 (385 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A good indication of pregnancy!

Disadvantages: Nasty, painful, itchy, unsightly rashes !

Having read many reviews on here from members who suffer from this debilitating condition, I just thought it might be worth jotting down my experience of eczema. I am not a medical practitioner nor an alternative remedy guru and do not necessarily advocate trying the things that worked for me. Moreover this does not aim to provide a definitive guide on the disease or how to deal with it. This is just a summary of my journey of discovery over the years and what worked for me.

On the National Eczema Society site I was surprised to read that up to one fifth of all children of school age have eczema, along with about one in twelve of the adult population, quite a sizeable proportion. If you want to research further, the National Eczema Society at http://www.eczema.org/ will give you details of the types, the causes, etc. Therefore I won’t go into all the gory details here. Suffice it to say that there are many types and many causes, triggers and degrees of severity. It is a very uncomfortable condition which can be extremely painful, itchy, humiliating and embarrassing. I am fortunate in that I only usually suffer from relatively small, localised outbreaks: for others it is so severe it can be debilitating and affect their entire lifestyle.

I first developed eczema after the birth of my first child (28 years ago, ouch!) and it was my hands that were chiefly affected with smaller eruptions elsewhere on my body from time to time. It was so bad that people sometimes asked if I had burned my hands. The GP’s answer was to prescribe steroid creams and ,when these failed, stronger steroid creams. Eventually in exasperation he advised me to go and get pregnant again because that would clear it up. Helpful! In fact two years later, the clearance of my eczema was the first indication that my daughter was on her way and that happened only two weeks after missing my first period. But to embark on further pregnancies seemed an expensive way to cure this particular itch!

The eczema returned once my daughter made her entrance. (It later transpired that she started to suffer eczema when reaching around 4 years of age, my son however is unaffected ). The GP again prescribed powerful steroid creams for me and, on one occasion, steroid tablets on a three week reducing dose. The latter healed and made me eczema free for a couple of weeks but produced no lasting effect. I knew the creams were dangerous as they cause thinning of the skin but I tried to use them sparingly. However after nearly four years of constant application, they were causing skin to grow over the affected areas without healing those areas. This resulted in some nasty infections.

Apart from the steroids, the only other thing the doctor recommended was to bath using emollient cream rather than soap. This did not seem to help at all. Not only was it impossible to wash off, it made the skin feel very unpleasant and oily. and left a nasty residue on the bath and on towels. It was also impossibly slippery and when I slipped and hit my head in the bath one day as a result, I gave up using it!

I don’t know whether things have improved today but, in those days, GPs did not give handy advice on the subject and it was largely left to me to research and discover for myself how I could help the situation. I tried keeping a food diary and avoiding all sorts of food stuffs ( e.g. dairy products, seafood, and even wine) one by one but I could not identify even one trigger food.

Deciding that the cause must be contact with certain products I started to research which seemed to affect my skin resulting in the following list:-
· All soap and soap products except glycerine and olive oil varieties. I can use shower gels and creams from sensitive ranges such as Neutrogena and Sanex.
· Biological washing powders and even some non-biological ones – the only truly safe variety for me being Persil non-biological. In fact when Persil briefly stopped production of this back in the late 80’s or early 90’s there was such an outcry from eczema sufferers and pressure from the National Eczema Society, that they quickly re-introduced it.
· All synthetic materials and wool – the best thing next to my skin was, and still is, cotton.
· Any number of chemicals in cleaning products
· Rubber Gloves which one needs for protection from such chemicals are a “No No” unless I wear cotton gloves underneath.This is extremely fiddly! The disposible thin plastic gloves are a better alternative but can work out expensive.
· Any products containing lanolin – including Fairy washing up liquid which did and still does bring me out in a rash although I don’t know if it still contains lanolin.
· Most scented products including a number of cosmetic brands
· Liquid fabric conditioners –which affect my daughter more than me. She still comes our in a rash on her face if she sleeps in bed linen which has been washed in these. However the fabric conditioning sheets used in the tumble drier seem to have no effect.
· Sun tan preparations - I have to be extremely careful to use only sensitive skin preparations. My daughter was allergic to them all even those formulated for babies, for many years although, now 25, she, like me, seems to be able to tolerate the sensitive skin preparations . This was really unfortunate as it’s virtually impossible to keep a young child covered on a hot day and/or out of the sun.
· Calomine Lotion – this just dries up my skin and makes it more prone to eczema.
· All metals used in jewellery except gold and silver -makes me a woman of very expensive taste but it's not my fault!
- Stress –this does not actually seem to cause an outbreak but intensifies any already present.

I flirted briefly with some alternative treatments such as Chinese herbal preparations which offered a disgusting brew to drink and homeopathic remedies, mainly graphites, (because homeopathy has helped me in the past ) but neither seemed helpful in alleviating my eczema symptoms so I shall not go into further detail here.

With avoidance tactics in place, the outbreaks got less frequent and more manageable over the years but, occasionally, would flare up particularly on my hands where the skin was already thin through application of the steroid creams. In fact my hands by this time were quite unsightly being rather wrinkled and, as some less kind people remarked , looked ten years older than the rest of me!

During one particularly savage attack with bleeding, oozing, itchy hands, it was my green grocer who, some ten years ago, made a suggestion which eventually helped me get the skin in that area back to a normal state.(Here I must ask you not to consider me a crank and I reiterate that I am not advocating this remedy, just recounting my own experiences!). He suggested wrapping my eczema in onion skins, the small silvery transparent skins which you can peel away from inside each layer of an onion. He told me that in Poland they use this as cure for leg ulcers because there is something in onions which cleanses wounds whilst at the same time promoting healing. I thought he was crazy but when I mentioned this to an elderly friend, who was a retired matron from a leading London teaching hospital, she was not surprised and explained that onion oil had always been used in her nursing days as a treatment for psoriasis.

I decided it was worth a try and, with tears in my eyes, I stretched the silvery skins over the affected areas of my hands and affixed with Micropore strips. And it worked! I tried it overnight and, for a while, it itched a great deal but then the itching disappeared and by the morning my hands looked significantly better and less angry and, after two further overnight applications, they were definitely healing. It has gone on working for me and for my daughter. My father has been affected by eczema on his hands in his later years ( he hates me calling it senile eczema!). He sometimes gets painful rashes and cracks on his fingers which he believes to be the result of some washing up liquids. My mother believes this is a convenient excuse to get out of the washing up but, after my experience with Fairy, I believe him! The first time I sent him to bed with fingers encased in onion skins, he was rightly sceptical but by the morning he was a convert and now uses the remedy whenever necessary. It has also worked for others with whom I have shared my experience. Since then I have only rarely used steroid preparations on my hands. I have also made extensive enquiries in my search for onion oil but apparently it is no longer manufactured.

I would add that I told my GP and a skin specialist about this experience and they both dismissed it saying that onion would only irritate any skin condition but this is not my experience. However, it is a very fiddly operation and rather an antisocial alternative as the onion scent is not the most pleasant odour around!

Moreover, it is no simple feat to attach onion skins to all the parts of the body where eczema may attack. A few years later, I suffered an outbreak on my chest –below the neck and above the boobs! It later turned out that I had become allergic to Anais Anais, a perfume which I had used for years. Even now I can’t use it on that area but I can use it on my wrists and arms This illustrates how selective eczema can be in its effects! It was difficult to use the onion skin remedy on such an extensive area and so I purchased some 1% hydrocortisone (steroid) cream which, by now, was available over the counter. But it only alleviated the rash, it would not heal! It was very unsightly if I went décolleté and irritated unbearably if I covered it up!

This attack coincided with a report, in the local Brighton newspaper, of a salve which had been produced by a local mother when she despaired that steroid treatments were not working on her young daughter. This was not an advertising feature just a news story. She used all natural ingredients with the advice of friends who were knowledgeable about natural remedies and concocted the salve in her own kitchen. So effective had it been in keeping her daughter’s eczema under control that she was now in the initial phases of marketing it. Brighton can be like a village at times and, having mentioned this to a friend who knew a friend of a friend of a friend etc., a small free sample of Purepotions Skin Salvation arrived at my door. I am intending to publish a review of this product shortly. This will give a more detailed account, including its availability, as it deserves more attention. Suffice it to say here that I combined this treatment with a tiny amount of the 1% hydrocortisone cream and the condition cleared up after a week never, so far, to return.

Today I am almost clear of eczema because I know many of the personal triggers I must avoid. However I do suffer the occasional attack – most noticeably on my face – where one should not use steroid creams. However, I am never without a 1% hydrocortisone (steroid) preparation (which I only use very sparingly), onions, micropore and my pot of Purepotions Skin Salvation. They have all contributed, and continue to contribute, to making my life more comfortable and rash free. It seems with eczema you must use your own initiative to discover what to avoid and maybe be prepared to go beyond the bounds of conventional medicine to find out what helps you.

Summary: Conventional medicine may not be enough. Altenative and quite unconventional therapies may help!