My eczema has evaporated

#blog

TL;DR

After "managing" Eczema my whole life with western drugs (topical steroids and immunosuppressants), my skin is now healthy and inflammation free using only lifestyle changes.

My faith in western medicine to tell us how to live healthily is quite shaken, and I believe you could get much better health outcomes if you adopt just a little cynicism for the health advice you get from the west. Don't stop going to your GP or taking antibiotics when you're really sick, but you have little to lose by being open-minded to diet advice from alternative medicines in addition to your regular medical advice.

Ayurveda is one such alternative medicine that I would vouch for if you're keen to treat chronic illness like eczema. I share some things I learned from ayurveda, like some lifestyle changes and regular purging to prevent build up of toxins that may cause chronic illness.

Finally, I strongly believe that our bodies have the tendency to heal themselves if only we'll get out of their way, a notion which is quite present in How Not to Die.

If you'd like to hear the long version, read on!

My journey with eczema

A history of

Note: Feel free to skip this part, because I've mostly written it for the wider web and eczema sufferers that want to compare symptoms.

For my entire sentient memory (since I was an early teenager), I have suffered from one unholy trinity of western diseases - eczema, asthma and hay-fever. All are symptoms of inflammation in the skin, lungs and nose.

Between the ages of 12 and 20, I tried almost all the recommended eczema treatments from my doctors.

And that's basically it! It's a surprisingly short list, isn't it?

When I was 20, my eczema didn't seem much different whether I put on steroid creams or not. After reading up on No Moisture Therapy (NMT), I decided to stop using creams. Where my eczema was formerly limited to my elbows and neck, it suddenly erupted all over my body for about a week. I would wake to raw skin from itching subconsciously during the night, and my skin would split and bleed. Not the sexiest origin story, but after two weeks it settled down, and while my skin didn't improve, it didn't change in quality either.

Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor, and this is my current understanding of eczema. Please correct me if you notice any harmfully incorrect information by emailing me at hey+my-eczema-has-evaporated at my first name + my last name + .com .

Eczema lives on a vicious cycle of "inflammation, allergen, scratch, repeat". The raw red itchy skin can be roughly broken down into "source eczema" and "flow-on eczema" (names mine). Say you towel off too intensely or you have a little too much friction from walking in the back of your knees, and the moisture barrier in your skin is temporarily removed. Allergens like pollen can now enter deeper layers of your skin, to which your immune system's bouncers respond with a loud GTFO in the form of itchiness and red inflamed skin; this is the "source eczema". You itch, and inevitably remove some moisture barrier from the surrounding skin, which in turn allows in some allergens, gets inflamed and becomes itchy; this is the "flow-on eczema".

I lived like this for two years, still itching with dry skin on the daily, resigned to living with eczema. It led me to adopt a lot of restrictions, such as:

At 22 I saw a doctor who noticed my skin and told me to "expect more from life" than my current condition. She referred me to a dermatologist friend of hers who put me on Dupilumab, an injectable immunosuppressant which had recently become subsidised and affordable (about $ 1540 for the year, including doctor's visits). Dupilumab specifically suppresses the itchiness response of your inflammation, without suppressing your general immune function, which means it breaks the vicious cycle of "flow-on eczema".

My life quality went from I'd say 4/10 to a 7/10. The baseline itching was mostly gone, though I still had inflamed red skin in the "source eczema" on my elbows, often my neck, and occasionally my scalp. I would get particularly itchy again around the end of my injection cycle (every two weeks), or if there was something stressful happening (somewhat frequently between work, my anxiety and the busy-city lifestyle). But certainly a huge improvement, and I would recommend anyone who feels like eczema is a distraction or inconvenience in their life to use Dupilumab to bring their eczema under control.

I thought this was the best that I could do with my eczema. But I know now that there's something much better, which allows me to heal and manage eczema with lifestyle alone, and removes the source eczema and baseline inflammation. I'm not a doctor, but I believe that if my body can heal itself under the right lifestyle, there is a way for other eczema sufferers to find the right lifestyle too.

The ayurvedic retreat

At 26 (that's now!), I went to an ayurvedic retreat in the hopes of finding new ways to manage my eczema. The immunosuppressant I was on (spoiler: I am no longer taking it) had been a good improvement, but I wanted to rid myself of ideally the drugs and the baseline inflammation. Also, the drug is still relatively new, and during one of my renewals I was blood-tested for signs of organ tumours, which was an unknown side effect when I started taking the drug (and I'd rather avoid waiting to find out it has other side effects in decades to come). It's also super annoying to travel with, because unlike insulin (a refrigerated drug that's widely available and comes in conveniently sized travel syringes), Dupixent is refrigerated, can only practically be dispensed in your home country, and comes in bulky single-use syringes that I need a 1.4L bottle to store 4 months worth.

I did a month-long yoga teacher training followed by a two-week ayurvedic retreat at AyurYoga eco ashram near Mysore, India. During this time, my eczema improved considerably, my inflammation completely disappeared, and I had a healthy moisture barrier on my elbows and neck for weeks long for the first time in my life. My hayfever has been nonexistent, and my asthma has only shown up in damp situations like monsoon season or rooms that gave my backpack mould.

It's been over one month since I left the ashram, and my eczema still hasn't shown itself. I've been (mostly) following a lifestyle and diet suggested by the ayurvedic doctor, and been living in the range of hot-dry and hot-humid environments between Tamil-Nadu (India) and Weligama (Sri Lanka). Assuming I'm onto something, this is obviously a huge relief and joy for me, because touch wood, I've just kicked the most frequent source of pain in my life. I can now also pursue a life phase of backpacking without the hassle of my huge injections bottle.

But it's given my mind a new chronic inflammation; I am frustrated and perplexed that the "all-mighty and powerful western medicine" (obviously sarcasm) never led me to this potential solution sooner. Given that exploring lifestyle and diet are mostly free from costs and side-effects, why wasn't this something I ever heard about from western doctors?

The IKEA manual for treating the human body probably exists

While traveling India, I learned something peculiar; autoimmune conditions like eczema are largely unheard of.

I spoke to a local integrative doctor (someone who is trained in allopathy and educates themselves on alternative treatments), who said that before he lived in the US, he hadn't heard of eczema. He also observed many of his fellow emigrants to the US develop eczema after they moved there.

A travel friend I met came down with an eye infection and was told to seek steroid cream, but they went to fifteen pharmacies before they found it.

Some Indian travellers shared that they learned to manage skin inflammation with diet from their parents. One friend said that when they notice a rash, they cut down their consumption of okra and eggplant, which fall into the nightshade family of histamine-rich vegetables that can aggravate inflammation.

This suggests to me that autoimmune conditions like eczema are largely non-present in India because their cultural heritage allows them to manage inflammation before it develops into eczema. You might think, "but what if the causes of eczema in the west are not present in India", but the gap between the west and India is shrinking; Indian metropolises and stressful work culture dwarf that of Australia, and India's dry heat is more extreme than Australia's if anything. I think the causes are controlled for.

Beyond eczema, I have heard of countless more remedies for common ailments which plague modern cities. I learned that dengue fever is commonly treated in villages with a hand-sized papaya leaf crushed up with water, or a baby jackfruit sliced and boiled with rice. I heard of rural Indian towns during early COVID where no person died or even suffered long-term symptoms, despite treating the most aggressive variants with no warning, having few doctors and utilising only an abundance of weeds. Ironically, the western stereotype that views India as full of poverty and disease is completely backwards; the villages seem to hold a medicinal wealth we can't even dream of.

Though I don't have an eBook available for "How to treat most ailments with local medicine", I am increasingly convinced that this knowledge already exists in pockets of the world that have survived colonialism's massive destruction of knowledge and culture. I believe that we could someday propagate this knowledge to many people, and that even if some of the treatments are mistaken, it would largely not harmful for us to trial them.

If you have a disease but aren't already headed for your death bed, you have some time on your hands to Fuck around and find out with various treatments. Obviously if your lungs are filling with fluid from bacterial pneumonia, then take the damned antibiotics. But if you're in the early stages of a cough with no prior lung conditions, would it hurt to try a local bush medicine concoction and note whether your condition improved faster than normal?

You might be thinking, "if this knowledge was out there, then surely we (western medicine) would have found it by now". And I used to think the same thing, until I realised that we're wilfully blind to certain treatments largely because they're unprofitable or taboo.

...but we refuse to look at it

It appears that the west is reinventing the wheel with a broken axle and a blindfold; we have tossed aside local medicine from the places we've colonised in the name of the scientific method, but we largely refuse to explore or validate these medicines. This knowledge still exists; initiatives like the Bush Food Education Centre are seeking to create connections between local Indigenous Australians and westerners to help reinvigorate the knowledge of native weeds which provide an abundant source of medicine. But we are slow to summon the effort to validate the effects of food with existing evidence of health benefits, let alone weeds or ancient medicines, with our "all-powerful" scientific method. How Not to Die demonstrates this idea with the large body of evidence for turmeric's impact on lung cancer cells, and the disappointing lack of studies for its impacts on actual humans with lung cancer:

Chemopreventive agents can be classified into different subgroups based on which stage of cancer development they help to fight: Carcinogen blockers and antioxidants help prevent the initial triggering DNA mutation, and antiproliferatives work by keeping tumors from growing and spreading. Curcumin (contained within turmeric) is special in that it appears to belong to all three groups, meaning it may potentially help prevent and/or arrest cancer cell growth.
...
Unlike most chemotherapy drugs, against which cancer cells can develop resistance over time, curcumin affects several mechanisms of cell death simultaneously, making it potentially harder for cancer cells to avoid destruction.
...
Unfortunately, turmeric has yet to be tested in clinical trials for the prevention or treatment of lung cancer, but with no downsides at culinary doses, I’d suggest trying to find ways to incorporate the spice into your diet.

We have already found some incredible merit to food as medicine. But the western health system is crippled by corporate bribery from food industries, and so this information effectively never escapes from the lab to reach the newspaper.

While this helpful information is technically there for the open-minded reader to find for themselves, we're not socialised to check the research for ourselves. While it's true that there are many snake oil supplements out there, many people I know still readily consume fish oil supplements despite evidence that they don't reduce mortality and actually increase risk of cardiac death (see How Not to Die -> How Not to Die from Heart Disease -> citations 16 and 17).

We wait for a news broadcaster to tell us that a research group found out that fish oil supplements are good for heart disease, and then we start taking them. But yet, when someone discovers that fish oil supplements aren't good for heart disease after all, we fail to receive the message, and we lack the cynicism or motivation to discover the information for ourselves. I believe this is because we place too much faith in western medicine and its filtered megaphones.

This isn't a conspiracy that the illuminati is trying to make us unhealthy; it's a concession that our research systems struggle to find great treatments that aren't profitable in the first place, and that even when they do, the corruption of western nutritional bodies suppresses this information from reaching everyone. The unfortunate consequence is that, if we want more optimal health, we have to now actively look elsewhere to make sure we're exposed to all the best treatments. I hope that you walk away reading this with a similar motivation to go beyond what you hear from your doctor or government about healthy diet and lifestyle.

Many westerners would have probably scoffed at the idea that mindful breathing can calm you down until we heard from some western research group via the telly. What if you'd waited your entire life to hear about this paper before trying to change how you breathe? You might have enjoyed decades of better mental health and calmness if you'd been open to non-western medical sources from the beginning (yoga has been broadcasting these benefits for decades to the world). My point is that you have very little to lose by looking beyond western medicine, and you might discover significant improvements in your health.

If you're convinced that Fuck around and find out is the best approach for your health, read on for some examples from alternative medicine that seem to have improved (and perhaps evaporated) my eczema.

It's not just what we eat, it's how we eat

I was given one "theory" from ayurveda that has shaped most of the lifestyle adjustments I've made since (I'm sure any ayurvedic doctor who trusts their lived experience of treatments would scold me for quoting "theory"). The theory is that partially digested food, called "arma", is a toxin, and can spread to other parts in your body from your small intestine. When arma builds up (like in the elbow skin), the immune system attacks it and triggers a vicious cycle of war against itself (as is the case in eczema). To ensure proper digestion and subsequent lack of arma, you must maintain blood flow and lack of stress to the digestive organs while and after eating.

This gives rise to a whole bunch of lifestyle recommendations about how to eat, like:

I'm sure many westerners might scoff and go "I'm not taking any snake oil! I'll wait for a paper to confirm this!". But why wait? If you face a chronic issue like "Hot-girl IBS", eczema or other indigestion, it doesn't really cost you anything to experiment with this and simply see how you feel. At the end of the day, you feeling better is the only outcome that matters whether you're taking a pill or

If you take away anything from this blog, please let it be this: you have incredibly little to lose by exploring lifestyle experiments with some common sense, and probably much to gain. If you want some inspiration, Ayurveda proposes that toxin-buildup is the cause of many chronic illnesses including eczema. It also proposes lifestyle and diet recommendations to avoid build up of toxins.

However, it's worth noting that our bodies don't just get toxins from indigestion. Which brings me to my final point...

Take what resonates, purge what doesn't

Our bodies fill up with pollutants from our environment; eat too much fish and you'll reach unhealthy levels of mercury in your body, and back before unleaded petrol we saw generations of birth with increased aggression from inhaling lead fumes.

What's more, we're forever learning about new little oopsies we released into our environment decades ago that have come back to bite us. We tore a hole in the ozone layer with fridge coolants that still hasn't healed, and learned recently (in the 2020s) that microplastics from fleece jackets are detectable in clouds.

I asked my ayurvedic doctor if there were any recommendations for preventing these toxins from getting into your body. And she essentially said "no; both your digestive organs and skin are a membrane which can frequently leak toxins into your body". This means that the only feasible solution is to routinely eject these toxins before they can wreak any havoc.

In my case, in order to be able to control my eczema with lifestyle alone, I would need to remove the existing toxins in my body first. You can't sanely experiment with diet effects on your eczema if you're routinely battling some toxins that are camping out under your skin.

My ayurvedic treatment was a "panchkarma", which usually goes like this:

Interestingly, during my Hatha yoga teacher training, they also recommended a regular practice called "shankha prakshalana"; this is similar to the ayurvedic poop purge, except that instead of using a herbal laxative, you drink a cup of salty water, do some yoga poses that turn your stomach into a blender, sit on the toilet, and repeat until the water is almost clear. You then spend the next two days eating simple unprocessed foods to let your stomach lining gently build up.

There are other practices which involve flossing your throat or even your stomach, which I do not have the stomach for. Given that yoga is thousands of years old, and the highly attuned relationship the yogis had to their bodies' needs, this suggests that purging might be a long-standing practice for better health.

Fear not! Regular purging doesn't mean giving yourself a "taccy" vomit. It means that every three to six months, you could treat yourself to a quiet weekend of yoga (with some unpleasant toilet visits), simple tasty food and some movie nights. My doctor also recommended donating blood, because it forces your body to build new blood cells (of all kinds), which helps to reduce inflammation from white blood cells that are going guerilla on your body.

Food for thought

I hope that if anything, sharing my experience here will at least spark some curiosity about alternative medicines. If I've done a great job, I hope it shakes your faith in western medicine as the ultimate source of truth, and makes you want to validate the things you hear on the news (and look for the things that aren't on the news!). How Not to Die is a fantastic book to start with for evidence-based diet changes to reduce risk of the top fifteen deadly diseases in western society.

As a little disclaimer, I am not casting a vote for every alternative medicine out there; I'm still skeptical of things like homeopathy which have been actively disproven by studies. But I believe that most people reading this are healthy, have a few years or decades left to live, and could massively benefit from a mindset of Fuck around and find out and learning about "food as medicine".

If you're in the sticks and are unsure where to turn with your chronic disease, then if you have the means to travel to India or a reputable ayurvedic centre, I would happily cast my vote for ayurveda. I went to AyurYoga eco-ashram and was treated by Dr Ashwati, who has spent her life immersed in ayurveda after it treated her cerebral palsy as a child. Her reputation precedes her, and going to any of her past clinics will probably be a safe bet. Otherwise, you want to look for a "panchkarma" treatment that doesn't shy away from the cleansing treatments; if you've handled your chronic illness till now, you can easily handle a big enema or two.

If you have any complaints, think I could have structured or worded something better, or you want to chat, please drop me a line on Instagram or hey+my-eczema-has-evaporated at my first name + my last name + .com . I've written it weirdly to prevent robots from harvesting my email address.

Thanks for your attention 😎
Jack

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