Conventionally accepted medical approaches of assessment for this condition may include looking at your skin rash and asking about stress in your life, your diet, drugs you are taking, and any chemicals or materials you may be exposed to at work, to find the cause of your rash. Generally your medical doctor may prescribe topical corticosteroids to relieve the itching and the redness. However, used over a long term, these cortisone based creams can have side effects such as thinning out the skin, especially when used to the sensitive skin of babies.
Under the concepts of naturopathic medicine, assessment is oriented toward determining what is impeding your body's ability to function normally. At the Nature's Intentions Naturopathic Clinic, our naturopathic doctor focuses on finding the root cause of the problem and then treating it with naturopathic treatments along with nutrition / diet and lifestyle changes and / or natural supplements. *
She might also recommend acupuncture as part of the treatment, depending on your symptoms. At your initial consultation, she may recommend food / environmental allergy or intolerance testing, and any other tests that she feels would be helpful in diagnosis and treatment.
Here are some natural treatment approaches that I suggest to help soothe eczema:
Here are a few things that you can change in your diet to help reduce the flare-ups that come with eczema:
A healthy lifestyle is of utmost importance to prevent re–occurrence of eczema. Anything that aggravates the symptoms should be avoided. This includes food allergens; although food allergies are a very individual matter, common irritants may include wheat, corn, dairy, soy, peanuts, eggs, beef, and lamb.
Discovering which foods you are allergic to and avoiding them is important. The most common allergenic foods include dairy products, soy, citrus, peanuts, wheat,fish, eggs, corn, and tomatoes.
A rotation diet, in which the same food is not eaten more than once every four days, may be helpful in treating chronic eczema.
Traditional Chinese Medicine is very effective in treating eczema. Usually, at the naturopathic clinic, we use acupuncture and herbal therapy to treat various skin disorders, and eczema as well. Acupuncture involves the insertion of sterilized fine steel needles at specific points in the body in order to stimulate the function of internal organs.
Three body meridians are essential to the treatment of eczema – the lung, spleen and liver meridians. These three organs have direct influence on the skin. Blood plays a defensive role by delivering nutrients and removing metabolic wastes, toxins and pathogens from the body. Usually, once the preliminary diagnosis is done, our naturopath may suggest acupuncture as part of the treatment plan and may suggest the patient to come in once a week for an hour–long relaxing and pain free acupuncture treatment.
The naturopathic treatments for eczema provided at our clinic aim for the treatment of the root cause of the eczema. *
* DISCLAIMER: The information on this article is the property of Dr. Sushma Shah, Naturopathic Doctor, and is not intended to treat, diagnose or cure any diseases or promote any services or products mentioned on the website.