Could Your Rash Be a Symptom of Something Bigger? ~ Natural Rash Treatment

Could your rash be a sign of something bigger?

During my dermatology training on natural rash treatment, we had a textbook from Dr. Irwin Braverman called Skin Signs of Systemic Diseases.

This book showed a number of serious diseases that also had a skin manifestation that was a tip-off. This was certainly one of the things that dermatologists learn in their training and one of the important reasons to go to a dermatologist when set of symptoms presents on your skin that doesn’t quite make sense to you or to perhaps your family doctor.

In my practice of holistic dermatology over the years, I found another set of underlying problems that can be related to skin issues.  For example, some cases of dry skin and seborrhea are indication that patients are lacking essential fatty acids and those essential fatty acids are important for preventing inflammation elsewhere and also for the proper function of the brain and the nervous system.

It’s really important to look deeper where problem doesn’t go away with a simple attempt to cure, a simple claim or whatever because the various things that present under the skin may well be symptoms of something deeper that needs to be remedy.


3 Anti-Aging Diet Secrets ~ Holistic Dermatology

3 Anti-Aging Diet Secrets

I want to talk a little bit more about anti-aging slowing the aging process and give you three anti-aging diet secrets.

Now you know we are all exposed to ultra violet light which causes aging of the skin. I’ve talked in a previous talk about how to protect yourself by external means and by timing, avoiding the harsh sun in order to keep from creating more damage.

And now I would like to talk about what you can do from the inside to protect yourself and from the inside they are various foods and food ingredients which are highly protective. Let me start with the carotenoids which are present in carrots and it’s interesting that the spectrum of products. It’s not just the isolated beta carotene is probably the best to take. So eating the whole carrot gives you spectrum of different carotenoids and eating other orange and red fruits and vegetables increases that spectrum of protectant antioxidants.

Let’s move on to the next category of bioflavonoid which are present in all kinds of leafy vegetables and fruits.

The bioflavonoid are also very prevalent in citrus fruits and especially in the pulp and in the white part inside the skin. So it’s not the juice so much but the entire fruit that contain those bioflavonoid. You should be sure to consume part of that.

Then, there is another class of antioxidants called proanthocyanidins and these are in the purple fruits and vegetables specially in the skin. And those are also present in certain other plants like ferns and concentrated these can be very powerful and very useful. But it’s also extremely important to have these in your foods where, they act naturally to protect you just as they protect the plants from the sunshine. Because, you know, you take a plant out in the sunshine before it’s fully developed the sun will kill it.

So they developed also the green chlorophyll and the develop these various antioxidants in a whole spectrum in order to protect themselves, and you want to eat those to help protect you. These are some great anti-aging diet secrets.


What you need to know about Rosacea ~ Holistic Skin Care

What you need to know about Rosacea

Rosacea is a condition that’s related to acne that involves redness of the face, enlargement of the vessels on the face, and also fine papules or pustules, usually at the central part of the face. Now there are a number of different types of this rash, some of which can be really disfiguring, where the nose can enlarge. Other types which just involve some redness that’s noticeable when you have an emotional reaction.

There are a number of things that are known to contribute to rosacea, could be caused by tiny mites called demodex that live in the skin. But not all rosacea is caused by that. The chronic inflammation of the skin causes enlargement of the little blood vessels that are in the skin called the capillaries, and that’s part of what causes the redness that you see.

So sometimes doing things or using nutritional substances that help those capillaries can make a big difference. Using inflammatory components of things that calm down inflammation can help make a difference and there’s a part that’s related to acne. So all the things that help the digestive contribution to acne can also be helpful for treating rosacea. And the main thing is not to be upset by it because that causes more blood to the face. And that causes the rosacea to be worst. So unwinding all the vicious cycles around this problem can make a big difference.


Has Your Acne Treatment Stopped Working? ~ Natural Acne Treatment

Has Your Acne Treatment Stopped Working?

Acne drugs are antibiotics. Because of that, there’s a possibility that the wrong kinds of bacteria or yeast have overgrown in your intestinal tract. You need to remedy that overgrowth so that it doesn’t cause a cascade of problems that makes your acne worse.

The first thing to address is to do whatever is necessary to restore a more normal population of bacteria in your digestive tract and gut.

You may need to make some changes to eat a cleaner diet which basically involves more steamed vegetables and less sugar and dairy.

And finally, your issue is related to hormone activity, you’ve got to reassess all the factors that are aggravating your acne hormonally. Sometimes, that means taking various kinds of herbs and making dietary changes, so that you correct hormonal problems, which can happen when, for example, you are stop and start taking birth control pills. These are a few of the things to consider when your traditional acne treatment stops working, and you are ready to begin looking at natural acne treatment.


The One Thing to Ditch to Keep Your Skin Young Naturally ~ Holistic Dermatology

The One Thing to Ditch to Keep Your Skin Young Naturally

All of us want to keep our skin looking young naturally.

Today, I want to speak about one of our sweetest poisons. I say sweet poison, it’s very attractive to all of us, including me, and that is: sugar.

You might not realize sugar has at least 3 different ways that it can aggravate disease, aging and acne.

First, it can lead to overgrowth of the wrong kinds of organisms in the intestinal tract and elsewhere the body. Those organisms include yeast and harmful bacteria.

Second, those organisms can lead to inflammation of the intestinal lining, causing a condition known as leaky gut and that leaky gut allows allergens to invade other parts of the body.

Third, eating sugar often causes tooth decay. If you eat sugar, you don’t brush your teeth right away, and it sits in your mouth, the bacteria are going party–they will chomp away at your teeth.

And chronic infection in the teeth can lead to infection in the bone in the jaw. Chronic infections in the jaw are often very hard to get rid of during your lifetime. And they can “weep” gram-negative bacteria and gram-negative toxins down into your lymphatic system, down to your heart, down to your breasts, and out also into various organs of the body, causing real damage.

The last way that sugar can cause problems is by elevating the insulin level. When you eat a lot of sugar, your sugar level spikes ways up and insulin is released in order to get that sugar into the cells. The more sugar you have and the more often you have it, the more you release insulin.

When you do this over and over again, you wind up causing high insulin levels, and the receptors for the insulin stop becoming so willing to hold the insulin. Then, the insulin has to go up higher and higher. You then get a molecule released called Insulin-Like Growth Factor. That Insulin-Like Growth Factor has a variety of actions, and one of them is to aggravate acne.

It’s so worthwhile to monitor your sugar usage and cut back however you can manage. It’s a challenge, but a very worthwhile one. You can keep your skin looking young naturally.


Are there AutoImmune Drug Alternatives? ~ Natural Treatments Require Commitment

Are there Autoimmune Drug Alternatives?

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.


One Way Your Face Ages and How to Fix It ~ Holistic Dermatology

One Way Your Face Ages and How to Fix It

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.


3 Natural Eczema Healing Treatments ~ Holistic Dermatology

3 Natural Eczema Healing Treatments

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.


Why Does the Body Attack Itself? ~ Holistic Medicine and Autoimmune Disease

Why Does the Body Attack Itself?

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.


1 Easy Habit for Anti-Aging: Dry Skin Brushing ~ Holistic Dermatology

Dry Skin Brushing: 1 Easy Habit for Anti-Aging

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.