Consider the cost of treatments that are currently available for autoimmune disorders. They have been developed using a large amount of technology that’s evolved over a number of years. Some of those drugs cost $6,000 a month in order to gain control of your autoimmune condition. These diseases are powerful. Imagine a natural treatment that does something similar for you, and you can get an idea of how much commitment it would require to get a handle on something that challenges your body this much.
Let this give you an idea how much energy is required from you and how much holistic medicine commitment is required in changing your lifestyle and in delving into the various causes in order to get a handle on it and to reverse the condition.
So if you want to avoid the $6,000 a month costs, and the potential dangers that go along with these powerful drugs, you have to make serious long-term commitments to dietary and lifestyle changes. And to the medical expenses related to testing and holistic treatments.
Keep digging until you get to the bottom of the causes that are going on for your system, so that you can get control of your own condition naturally. There are alternatives to autoimmune pharmaceuticals, but they’re not for everyone.
When your face ages, it’s often perceived by wrinkles and creases. Some of those wrinkles and creases come from having the same expression over and over again.
That expression is usually is one of squinting or anger or looking with interest listening to a friend speak. These are all expressions that cause a kind of additional wrinkling that you don’t need to have.
These are habits. If they occur over and over, year after year, decade after decade, you begin to get permanent creases in those areas. So you want to try to relax, and not have repeated wrinkling occurring from squinting or anger.
You can even try looking in the mirror and seeing what you are doing with your face on a repeated basis, and try to relax and let that go.
That can do a lot for reducing the creases and the wrinkles that often associated with aging of the skin. Collagen and elasticity are another matter, which we’ll discuss in a future post.
Let’s talk a little bit about natural eczema healing. Eczema is something that a lot of people experience, and I see more and more people with it in my practice every year.
There are some parts of the world, especially industrial cities like Liverpool, where the population with eczema is approaching 20% of children. Now what is going on here? Why is there so much eczema?
What causes eczema and how do you heal eczema naturally? It’s caused by a number of things. One of those causes is a defective barrier of the skin. That defective barrier can be caused by excessive washing.
GENETICS
But it can also be caused by a genetic tendency not to make the right peptides that keep the barrier to be intact. Those peptides are manufactured, and they evolve and have a number of different roles as they move through the skin. The first role is as a barrier, but as they move through the skin, they also become part of the anti-microbial peptides that cause the skin to kill trouble-causing bacteria. People who have have this genetic tendency not only have a less strong barrier, but they have less ability to break down the bacteria that are always attacking the skin.
People with eczema have the tendency to develop staph and streptococcus infections. And those staph and strept infections have a vicious cycle effect. Because they cause more cells to get alerted; more immune cells get turned on to be reactive and create more inflammation, which creates more itching, which creates more scratching, and more and more eczema.
So it’s really important for those people to use proper anti-bacterials and do whatever they can to keep from scratching and destroying their skin. And to use various kinds of things that enhance the barrier of the skin.
BARRIERS
Recently there has been a lot of work on using various kinds of waxes that contribute to the skin barrier for natural eczema healing. Pioneering dermatologists in San Francisco explored these waxes, which are now the basis of a lot of really popular products used to protect the skin for those with eczema.
Of course, any kind of lipid or fat or oil can add some benefit. But if you have eczema, the paradox is that it’s likely that if you use something over and over, you are going to become allergic to it. So people who have eczema soon become allergic to everything that they start putting on, partly because of the nature of the original barrier itself. Creams are much more elegant to put on than Vaseline or coconut oil. But they contain many different components, like detergents, to keep the oil and the water mixed.
Any cream with oil and water mixed together, can get infected easily so you have to have a preservative system. And there are only a handful of different preservatives that are used to protect these different creams from germs. So if you switch from one cream to the next, you are likely to wind up with the same preservative system one out of four times. So you still have trouble because you can have an allergic reaction to the preservatives.
On top of this, if you look at most of these creams you’ll find that there are a number of chemical substances whose names you can’t pronounce. Some of those chemicals can be potential allergens as well.
It’s not unlikely that after a while you are going to become allergic to either the components or the fragrances in those creams. So you’ve got to be very careful with what you’re putting on your skin if you have eczema.
I do help people who have these chronic issues to finally break the cycle, but I share all this to say that if you’re having a hard time controlling your eczema, you’re not alone, and the treatments don’t make it easy. That’s my holistic dermatology perspective for natural eczema healing.
Your body ought to know who’s you and who’s not you, right? This is what whole immune system is set up to figure out: who is you and who is not. This is an extremely important task, and this task is done by a whole network of different cells. Indeed, when you’re born, your body determines who is you and who is not. The immune system becomes tolerant of cells that are you. When there is an external attacker, like a bacteria, your body produces antibodies to destroy it.
But, when there is a subtle threat, such as one of your own cells transforming into a tumor (or virus or a fungus) living inside your cells, altering your cells, then it takes a very subtle immune system to detect that there is a difference and to recognize and attack those altered cells.
When your immune system becomes confused, perhaps because of various issues, you can become sensitized to that cell or foreign agent that looks a little bit like your own cell. With the confusion from something else going on, you can attack your own self by mistake, and that’s what we call autoimmune inflammation. The following can sensitize or confuse your immune system, especially if more than one of these things is present in your body at once:
stress
a virus
infections
vaccinations
medications
exposure to something that looks like some particular cell or cell component
Just the wrong set of circumstances can cause this “confusion” so that perhaps a bacteria or virus entering your body looks a little like some particular cell in your body. Your body attacks that bacteria and then begins to attack that cell in your body.
For example, certain viruses can cause an attack on the cells in the pancreas that make the insulin, which can cause Type One Diabetes. There are whole number of examples that are known and there are probably thousands or even millions more that have not been recognized.
These are some of the ways that autoimmune conditions can arise in your body and that your body might even attack itself. You can treat autoimmune disease with holistic medicine, but it requires real commitment.
I’d like some thoughts on anti-aging of the skin. Aging skin needs a little bit of extra stimulation in order to be really as thick as possible to keep the collagen active. This keeps the lymphatics in the blood supply moving. Part of that is good old exercise and outdoor enjoyment, and hopefully protecting yourself from the sun.
Another part of it is stimulating your skin to kind of wake it up in the morning is by dry skin brushing. You take a soft brush, and you brush your skin. Brush it all towards the area right below your navel which is where all the lymphatic material collects. And you do that all over very lightly and gently. You shouldn’t do it with a brush that is stiff enough to hurt you or to mark your skin. If you have some kind of skin problem that doesn’t allow that, then that’s not the thing to do. But the dry skin brushing can be a very nice method for keeping your skin stimulated.
If you don’t have a brush you can use Turkish towel or a wash cloth. That little bit of stimulation moving towards the center of the body can be very helpful to get your skin woken up and keep it alive and invigorated.
