Treating Eczema
Only those who have eczema know how irritating and painful it can be. Your dry, cracked and scaly skin can be so painful that scratching due to itchiness can cause bleeding and more pain. In Australia, our hot and humid summers makes management even more difficult, and night time offers little relief as we scratch in our sleep.
There are three key triggers that exacerbate skin inflammation
- contact irritants
- food irritants
- stress.
At As Nature Intended we have achieved excellent results with patients by identifying their individual triggers, and creating a personalized treatment plan that provides long-term relief, and symptom-free skin.
Our goal is for you to obtain eczema-free skin, so make an appointment today
Our Approach
Step 1: Identify Triggers
Rather than conducting an elimination diet to determine dietary triggers, we take a small sample of your hair and send it away to be tested against 500 items, including food and other household and personal care items. The results of the ‘500 Hair Test’ give you a complete list of the triggers that are unique and individual to you.
Step 2: Remove Food Triggers
We work with you to create a nutrition plan to completely eradicate the foods from your diet that flare your eczema. The common offenders are gluten, dairy, eggs, peanuts and other nuts, soy, and shellfish, but it may be something less common like corn, tomatoes, citrus, strawberries, food preservatives or artificial colouring. Whatever your triggers are, their removal from your diet will down-regulate inflammation, heal your gastrointestinal lining and drastically improve your eczema symptoms.
Step 3: Identify Contributing Factors
We will examine the other products that are coming into direct contact you’re your skin that may be contributing to inflammation, and will work with you to find more natural, less-toxic options can provide some relief.
Step 4: Provide Supporting Treatments
We will provide a custom treatment plan for you that could include herbal medicine or nutritional supplementation. These treatments help reduce inflammation and heal the gastrointestinal lining at a quicker rate than food elimination on its own, which will speed your healing and recovery.
Step 5: Alleviate Symptoms
While we treat the underlying cause of eczema symptoms and your body is healing, we will provide a specialised cream to alleviate the itching, irritation and pain and help to facilitate skin healing.
Step 6: Reduce Stress
This step is very important, as stress hormones play a role in creating eczema inflammation as cortisol (your stress hormone) aggravates the skin. Therefore, it’s important that you manage your stress by scheduling in more downtime and focusing on doing activities that make you happy. We will also help your body cope and adapt to stress with herbs and nutritional supplements, and work with you to identify any food triggers, illnesses or internal inflammation which also play a part in activating the stress hormones and the stress response.
Our goal is for you to obtain eczema-free skin, so make an appointment today
How does diet treat an incurable condition?
Certain foods are likely activating your immune system, causing a cascade of inflammatory chemicals in your body that contribute to your inflammatory skin condition. Many people try an elimination diet, which removes the main, common triggers and slowly re-introduces them to watch for exacerbation of symptoms. As mentioned previously, the common offenders are gluten, dairy, eggs, peanuts and other nuts, soy, and shellfish. But what if your triggers as not in that list, or if your triggers are a combination of foods? Elimination diets end up being trial-and-error, take a frustratingly long time to work through, and often don’t provide an accurate answer.
This is why we recommend the 500 Hair Test – it takes the guesswork out of your diagnosis, provides you with a clear picture of your triggers, and allows us to develop a treatment plan specifically for you.
Why does this work better than conventional treatments?
Conventional treatments overly rely on the use of hydrocortisone creams, which are simply a band-aid. They provide immediate relief for your symptoms, but don’t treat the underlying causes, so all your symptoms come right back once the steroid cream runs out. Living with the side-effects of hydrocortisone creams can provide its own stress – increased sweating, acne, stretch marks and thinning of the skin do not need to come part-and-parcel with your eczema diagnosis.
You can manage the symptoms of this condition without being reliant on hydrocortisone creams by focusing on your diet, and other triggers.
