Steroid free Day 10

Greetings to all your beautiful people out there. The beer blog will be taking a temporary hiatus as I will be focusing this blog on my hopeful recovery of pseudo eczema.

Now most of you know I suffer from what I'd always believed was eczema. At work, people have seen me tape my fingers. In jitsu, it wouldn't be uncommon place for me to breakfall a couple time and have my hand open up with sores and cuts. And in general, all of you have seen me scratch. No lie it's true.

In my never ending search for something to avail me of this living hell I had search and visited anyone that would listen.

Western Medicine has me on topical steroids in addition to PUVA, Protopic Ointment and Oral Prednisone along the way.

The naturopath said I might have leaky gut syndrome and should take lots of Omega 3s, probiotics and ACESe + Zn to help sort it out. They also mentioned I might have food sensitivities to Dairy, Eggs, Soy and a bunch of other stuff.

Recently, the food sensitivities thing proved true with more and more food causing flares. Removing dairy, whey, eggs, soy, chicken, tomatoes and strawberries would cause minimal cracking in the hands. This never made sense to me though since I would eat all these things as a child and none of the current symptoms had ever shown. It's almost as if the eczema had evolved.

Even with that though my eczema didn't subside and most recently I had the worst flare up ever seen post grading season and move. During the move, I watched my hands crack and bleed beyond control and even remember seeing the healthy skin fall off a small portion of my hand as I washed it causing an open sore. My immediate response to this was to add polysporin and of course steroid creams to tame the flare.

But, for all my efforts, the chronic swelling and cracking did not go away. Seeing how my right hand wouldn't even close for about two weeks straight, I once again turned to the internet.

A few recommended the candida diet to help ease overgrowth of candida in the gut. I have been observing this diet in some form for a couple weeks now and seeing some mild aid. Moreover though, in my internet search, I found one individual who had tried candida and now trying Topical Steroid Withdrawl and was seeing skin healing.

What is TSW? The short answer is that TSW is an acknowledgement that Topical Steroids are actually the cause of eczema like symptoms after chronic use. Years of use has caused the subdermal layers to thin beyond functional use which results in the epidermal thickening and resulting eczema look. Additionally, the adrenals start to misbehave as the steroids start to go systemic with changes.

The simple answer recommended by ITSAN? Cease and desist all topical steroids immediately. The result? Full recovery of pseudo eczema (termed Red Skin Syndrome) over the course of months and years.

Now considering my hand was falling apart with mere skin washing, I am more than happy to give this a try. I am currently 10 days in and have already seen a marked reduction in hand swelling. My natural itch has gone up but that's normal since the systemic steroids have been removed since they are no longer bleeding in through the skin. Over time many TSW bloggers have now seen relief of RSS/TSW and I'm throwing my hat into the fold in hopes that if this works, someone may find this and find the inspiration to endure TSW to find their own relief.

Let the battle begin!