I stopped using all topical steroids on April 1st, 2014.
After reading up on topical steroid withdrawal and watching videos of people who successfully beat this thing, I rationalized that my body was trying to have a flare, but I was suppressing it by using betamethasone. I stopped using topical steroids cold turkey hoping it would allow my the flare to continue on its own. And boy did the flare did resume! Almost immediately the day after the itching and burning started. At around this time, I started seeing a traditional Chinese medicine doctor and he thought my foot might have some fungal infection (athlete's foot) in addition to the eczema because he saw some circular patterns. Of course I was also given some foul medicine to brew and drink twice daily. That stuff makes me fart all the time and the farts smell pretty horrible. The chinese doc gave me a TCM antifungal cream, that cream burned my foot and it caused the skin on my foot to crack. I stopped using the cream on my foot (it hurt too much) and let the thing dry out, the TCM doctor did say to let it dry out to avoid bacterial infection.
After reading up on topical steroid withdrawal and watching videos of people who successfully beat this thing, I rationalized that my body was trying to have a flare, but I was suppressing it by using betamethasone. I stopped using topical steroids cold turkey hoping it would allow my the flare to continue on its own. And boy did the flare did resume! Almost immediately the day after the itching and burning started. At around this time, I started seeing a traditional Chinese medicine doctor and he thought my foot might have some fungal infection (athlete's foot) in addition to the eczema because he saw some circular patterns. Of course I was also given some foul medicine to brew and drink twice daily. That stuff makes me fart all the time and the farts smell pretty horrible. The chinese doc gave me a TCM antifungal cream, that cream burned my foot and it caused the skin on my foot to crack. I stopped using the cream on my foot (it hurt too much) and let the thing dry out, the TCM doctor did say to let it dry out to avoid bacterial infection.
It was around this time that I was reading about moisturizer withdrawal (MW) on the ITSAN.org forums and how it can speed recovery. The theory behind MW makes a lot of sense. The skin needs to form a scab to recover but moisturizer prevents the skin from doing so. Furthermore, using moisturizers is apparently not a great thing to do because it tricks the skin into thinking it doesn't need to produce/retain its own moisture anymore, which is what leads to further eczema.
I cleaned my foot with isopopyl alcohol (which helps dry the skin and is anti-baterial). You can see my foot looks pretty bad, it really scared me at first because it looked like a zombie, the dry skin was initially really painful, but after a while I would get used to the pain and the skin became stronger and the scabs would lessen. I was itching and burning all over, my foot was the least of my areas of concern now.
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| 2014-04-06 |
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