Uncommon Skin Diseases that are Hard to Treat ~ Integrative Dermatology

Uncommon Skin Diseases that are Hard to Treat

Interviewer:   So, tell us about some of the most difficult cases you have solved–uncommon skin diseases and unexplained rashes–with integrative dermatology.

Dr. Dattner:   Well, I remember once having a farmer whose scalp is always breaking out with pustuals and inflammations. I had to treat him with steroids and antibiotics just to get him under control repeatedly and then I found out that he was getting sprayed with the pesticides.  I started thinking now why would the scalp break out with pustuals and all these and I was thinking maybe the body as a response of trying to get rid of these neurotoxic substances so they don’t go into that other fat containing organ in the brain.

Interviewer:   Yeah!

Dr. Dattner:   So, I got him away from the pesticides and I used a cleansing tea. You came and you made a gallon of this stuff, it was really a potent cleansing tea and it cleared it up.

Interviewer:   Amazing, I mean it’s amazing, but it happens. I know you see even more than that one case you see one….

Dr. Dattner:   Yeah, and unfortunately he confirmed that this was the case by his son who had to do something for the neighbor. His son, I think, sprayed it again and he got the spray on him and he broke out again and he cleared again with it. So the P value, the likelihood that this was really doing it, increased tremendously. I wouldn’t have done that experiment myself, but he did it accidentally.

Interviewer:   Accidentally, sure.

Dr. Dattner:   So that’s an example of the kind of things I treat…

Interviewer:   Yeah, again inside out, always.

Dr. Dattner:   Recently I had a patient who came in, now sometimes it takes a long time to get acne under control, but I had a patient who came in, who had been having a lot of sugar and whatnot and she had cystic acne all over her face. In a month she came back. She was dramatically better.


Absolute Best Protection Against Skin Cancer ~ Best Natural Skincare

Absolute best protection against skin cancer

The best protection against skin cancer is to protect yourself against sunburns. Sun exposure, even without burning, could possibly contribute to that, but the worst is to use sun exposures and have so much damage that the skin can’t handle it, which usually results in redness and irritations of sunburn. In order to do that, you really need to use more than just the sunscreen.

You need to time your outdoor activities if you are fair skinned, so that you are outside before 10 or 11 in the morning or after 4 in the afternoon. It is also important to be under shade such as an umbrella or overhang of a building and also to use sun protective clothing because that protects better than sunscreens.

Sunscreens should be used in addition to protecting against the reflected light from water, sidewalks or sand. This is the start of best natural skincare.


What to Do Immediately After a Sunburn ~ Natural Sunburn Care

What to do immediately after a sunburn

The best thing to do for sunburn is not to get one. Avoid sunburn to keep skin from aging, fend off wrinkles, and prevent skin cancers like melanoma and basic cell carcinoma. But here are some tips on natural sunburn care

Of course, protecting your skin and carrying some protective clothing on a cloudy day when you are expect to be out all day is a very good idea to protect herself.

But if you do get the sunburn, then the most important thing to do is first cover yourself up so you don’t get any more further damage. If fact it’s a good idea to check yourself if you’re outside a lot, periodically to see if you’re burning because you may be so busy and so active whether in the water or the wind and not noticing it. You want to catch it before you start turning red.

Now, if you do get a sunburn, the important thing is to see how bad it is. If it’s just redness and not blistering, sometimes things like a solution of Aspirin can actually calm down the readiness.

Also, topical and oral antioxidants can both protect you and also help calm down the sun damage, that means things like vitamin C, vitamin E, N acetyl cysteine and glycolic acid.  Those are all things that can calm sunburn down.

Natural sources of antioxidants include the inside of the citrus fruits, the white part and the pulp and also the extracts from grape seed, like the proanthocyanidins that are so protective as antioxidants. So taking those may give you a little bit of a benefit if you had too much so sun.


Could You Be Allergic to Your Wedding Ring or Other Jewelry? ~ Natural Skincare

Could You Be Allergic to Your Wedding Ring? ~ Best Natural Skincare

Could you have a wedding ring allergy?  I don’t mean to your spouse necessarily, but the ring itself.  Your wedding ring is made out of gold usually, but even eighteen karat gold can have nickel in it. It’s possible to have what we call contact hypersensitivity, especially to jewelry with nickel and rarely to gold, and also to many other things. It’s also possible to have an irritant dermatitis to the soap that collects underneath your ring.

These are all reasons that you get a red rash under your wedding ring or any other jewelry that you wear on your body. Contact dermatitis typically is in the areas where you are contacting some kind of metal or some kind of chemical in your clothing or in your environment. Typically contact dermatitis takes about two days to come on from the start time of exposure. It lasts for about two weeks.

Often people don’t notice what caused it because already a couple of days have gone by before they see it. You need to be aware that another form of dermatitis can be from external things and what we call contact dermatitis.


What’s the Right Amount of Sun Exposure for You? ~ Restorative Dermatology

WHAT’S THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF EXPOSURE FOR YOU ~ RESTORATIVE DERMATOLOGY

There are people who argue that you should get no sun exposure at all.  I’m not in that camp, as you can tell by my suntan.  However, I do protect myself as much as I can when I am outside.

I am a Mediterranean skin type with brown eyes and I can deal with ten or fifteen or twenty minutes of sun exposure with no problem. If I get a lot more sun exposure, I’ll get red. It’s the beginning of the season when I haven’t been outside it all. I’ll get even a chance at burning my skin, so I’m very careful with that. Now if you have light skin, you’re one of those types from whose family descends from the northern climates, then you could probably take less sun than that.

If your skin is darker, you can deal with even more sun, and not have a burn or as much damage. Remember our skin makes vitamin D. So the places that are family descended from determines how much sun we need to get through in order to make enough vitamin D. I think it’s important that you understand how much it takes to give yourself a little bit of vitamin D production, which could be ten or fifteen minutes on the side as an average, for an average person, say a Mediterranean skin type and from that, gauge how much sun you get, but certainly well before the time where you would turn red.


Could Environmental Toxins Aggravate Acne? ~ Best Natural Skincare

Could Environmental Toxins Aggravate Acne? ~ Best Natural Skincare

We know that acne can be aggravated by chlorinated oils that are used as cutting oils, and that can be a real aggravator for people who are in a profession, like plumbing where they are cutting pipes on a regular basis.  

Another toxin that can aggravate the skin is from soot and way back in the 1700’s, it was identified as a cause of cancers in chimney sweeps.  Another type of toxin that’s much more common would be the various types of pesticides that sometimes are absorbed through the skin and can cause problems in the skin and of course, elsewhere.

Other types of more common exposures are to detergents which irritate by stripping the oils off the skin and causing dryness by breaking the barriers so that other problems develop on top of that, like secondary infection.  We’ve got to be careful about the use of various things that are on the skin and observe whether they’re  aggravating and avoid carefully if they are.


Yellow & Orange Vegetables: Best Natural Skincare Diet


Yellow and orange vegetables like squash, carrots, or even fruits, like cantaloupe, or orange and red peppers have antioxidant capabilities that protect your body. The family of antioxidants in those foods are called carotenoids. Now, I know there’s been some bad press about beta carotene. But that was an isolated compound. Plants don’t have pure beta carotene. They have a whole variety of caratonoids in them, and if you eat a wide variety of foods, you get an even wider variety of caratonoids, and that network of caratonoids is what the plant is using to protect itself from oxidative damage (which causes aging), so doesn’t it make sense to use not just the most active ingredient, but also the whole broad spectrum that’s present in those plants? So eating those things has a wonderful protective activity in your body, and of course they protect your skin.

Now, a caution, if you eat too much of these, like you’re juicing them every day in large quantities, you may find that you get a slight yellow tint to your skin! That’s not necessarily harmful, but a lot of people find it somewhat objectionable to start turning yellow or orange on the palms and other parts of your skin. So, within reason, these are very important plants to add to your diet.


What to Do if Your Eczema Cream Stops Working ~ Holistic Treatment

What to Do if Your Eczema Cream Stops Working ~ Holistic Skincare

It’s possible that you became allergic to one of the components of your eczema cream. It’s important to realize that there are certain kinds of things like preservatives in the creams that are very limited in the types that can exist.

So even if you go to another cream you might find that you’re still going to break out. If that’s the case, you really need to go to somebody who has a great background in chemistry or in dermatology who understands what these things are and can help you figure out what things you need to avoid.  It could be either the preserve system or it could be the actual emollient, the oil part of the cream.

Remember that many components of creams are required as opposed to an ointment or an oil which doesn’t need any kind of emulsifier or preservative, but certainly is not as elegant, as it stains your clothing. It’s important to vary what you’re using, but to do it in a way that avoids the things that have cause problems before. This is the beginning of holistic skincare.


Natural Skin Care Success Stories

“When you think about some of the patients you’ve treated over the years, are there any in particular that stand out as particularly remarkable?”


“Yeah there are, I can think of one patient who I have seen in my previous practice in Connecticut who came down to visit me and had a lump on his back and the lump was when I biopsied it was loaded with white blood cells now look like it was a lymphoma. Interestingly enough he had been exposed in his work to a very potent solvent for many years for over 20 year to a very potent solvent for many years for over 20 years as a typewriter repair man. It was a former trichloroethylene as I immediately suspected that there was a connection and I did some things such as gave him some different supplements that helped him remove that material from his body as well as giving him some supplements which have been known to be effective in various kinds of cancer. The next time he came back there was no lump to be found.”


“Wow!”
“Have you noticed that you’ve treated people who have certain mental block or mental hang ups and give a talk to them about what those are and then when they resolve their skin conditions go away?”


“There are definitely people who I’ve use techniques on to release various kinds and anxieties and stresses in conflicts. One of those techniques is new modulation technique which involves tapping on acupuncture points along with a series of suggestions to release things. I had a patient with herpes aster which was I’m threatening to involve the eye and possibly even threatening to cause blindness because of its location on the nose. That patient didn’t want to take the medications that would have easily worked, so I used this technique and the next phone call I got was it’s all better so that was a great relief for me as well as for her. I’m there are a number of other techniques and I had the privilege in the past six months of meeting John Sarno who does a lot of work with psychosomatic issues where they are or hidden underlying problems leading to the cause disorders in some of my work is leading people to that kind of release.”


Holistic Dermatology and Natural Skin Care: What is it?

“I want to introduce my guest today Dr. Allan Dattner. Thank you for being on the show today.”


“Thank you, I’m glad to be here.”


“As I said in the beginning you are in a fascinating field because there are dermatologist in the world who practice medicine a certain way they’ve been schooled in traditional methods allopathic methods and that leads to certain results and you have come along and you’ve said I want to do something a little different.”


“That’s correct”


“You have a holistic approach which I am very much in alignment with. What I’d like you to do is tell us about your background by how this all started for you. You were in college you became a doctor and what happened after that?”


“Well actually it started while I was in college. I started working at a little laboratory in Rye called Sloan-Kettering and a in a field called tumor immunology which was only occupying one room there. It’s grown logarithmically sense, but that got me very interested in the field lymph. I continue their studies on and off throughout my medical school in afterwards and during my during my fellowship to my residency in finally afterwards at the National Institute of Health the National Cancer Institute in the dermatology Branch. In our work there demonstrated nature in the recognition of the lymphocyte between different kinds of substances. We call it cross-reactive recognition. It was that understanding cross-reactive recognition the let me understand how diet could actually change what the body’s immune system was recognized. How that might pertain to different substances in one’s food causing inflammation or contributing to inflammation. That strengthen my pursuit of the pathway of diet and disease in the skin.”


“Dr. Dattner, so how many years ago was this that you’re talking about? “


“Well that was in the late seventies in 1976 I went to the NIH I left Pelham where I was living. Packed up my belongings and wife where we went down to Maryland. There I worked as a visiting scientist for almost three years.”


“Okay and so that was a long time ago. You must be honor as one of the pioneers in this field.”


“Yes I believe I’m one of the early pioneers, perhaps one of the people who started this field. You probably see my website holisticdermatology.com is number one on Google for that. Probably, because I started so many years ago before other people that into it. After I left there I was hoping to do some studies on nutrition and the immune response, but it was a very difficult thing to find people with the imagination to do that at that time and the funding. So I well and up joining a clinic in Putnam Connecticut connected with the Yoga Institute that was very much oriented towards vegetarianism, supplements and nutritional therapies. From there I just kept on learning and kept on building. I was part of us a small seminal group physicians throughout the Northeast who met and influence speakers several times a year. Discussing topics in this area and over period seventeen years got to learn a lot and meet a lot of people who also were key people in coming forth with new ideas and help put these things together. I must emphasize that although some of the information came from holistic medicine in from the periphery and from traditional techniques. A lot of it really was based on good hard science that news just being interpreted in highlighted in a different way than most to my colleagues highlighted that science.”


“What have you been noticing over the years?”


“I’ve been noticing over the years that the things that I’ve been excited about take 10 to 20 years before they catch on and then they catch on really big. For instance I would be getting up a meetings at scientific meetings and saying why don’t we put some vitamin E in vitamin C in into these immunodeficient mice that are being exposed to light or radiation in C with a dozen people would poo-poo me and try to shut me up. Well I went on with it like this for years and then the whole cosmetically industry started about ten or fifteen years ago using the kinds of things that I was talking about. I’ve been seeing so many the things that have been predicting coming into fruition that now I’m beginning to say it’s time for me to bring a few of the things that I’ve been thinking about that have been already been taken into account into fruition.”