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Good riddance to eczema & psoriasis

by Joel Whitehead

Quite a few people come into my clinic and ask for topical lotions and creams for skin conditions. In Chinese Medicine we have lots of effective ones, so I can usually pass something on that works quite well. Largely, the problems are psoriasis and or eczema.

Most people are used to just using a new topical cream until it isn’t effective anymore, and then just switch to another one. Occasionally, when it gets bad enough, they use a steroid, or go on prednisone for awhile for just a period of relief from the itching, scaling, and bleeding. Puva treatments will get rid of the lesions in some cases, but the itching, that maddening itching, usually persists.

Mostly people become resigned to it, believing there is no real or lasting relief, but almost all the patients who come to us for treatment and persist, would say that they are very wrong.

For the most part, skin reactions are toxic reactions. When we think of toxicity, we think of poisons coming out of the skin, but that is only one kind of toxin. In Chinese Medicine, we consider excess heat a toxin as well, and it can have the same effect when it produces a skin eruption. In actuality, this means that your skin’s workings are quite good and that if it weren’t so good this toxicity could go more internally and cause other things like infections or fevers, or even be part of a cancer picture. Dryness or dampness are also agents, in a manner of speaking, of toxicity; one leading to dry lesions (eczema) and the other to damp weeping lesions (psoriasis).

While that may explain the lesions, it doesn’t necessarily explain the itching. The itching is actually a wind in the skin that is either contracted externally or derived internally by the liver.

This may all sound too general or educational for you to identify with personally, but let me make just one more point that may make total sense to you. If the body’s balance is good and the blood is good, the blood will bathe the skin and you won’t have these skin problems.

Eczema

Eczema is normally associated with dryness. For the most part the skin of the body is an outward extension of the lung which may at times also be dry, as in a dry cough or constant dry mouth or thirst. At times when the lungs are good, the eczema may be worse, but as long as the skin is worse, the lungs may have less problems. Often in children’s cases, it will alternate with asthma, and if the child or person is weak enough, both may be bad at the same time.

Actually, the real perpetrator is most often the liver. Not only does the liver serve as the most toxin-dumping organ, but is the most stress-responsive organ as well. Many preconditions exist which make the liver the causative agent, and all of them come from the blood which the liver needs in proper abundance and flow to function properly:

1. You may have dry liver blood, which allows the energy and the blood to separate and send an itching wind to the skin.
2. You may have blood stagnation, which, though slightly different, may lead to the same thing. If you have either condition, you may see floaters before the eyes and have a rather pervasive thirst as you are always trying to liquefy to make the blood a more operative and effective agent in the body.
3. The third condition is a yin deficiency, which means essentially that the liquefying portion of the blood is lacking, and that you may sweat at night and have a lot of thirst especially in the darker hours.
4. You may just have a deficiency of the blood which could mean that you are tired and pale and itch a lot.

Psoriasis

For psoriasis, most of the above holds true, except that there is a dampness involved, and so the lesions are weepy as well as bleeding, itchy, and all the rest. It tends to settle under the scalp, and in the cracks of the skin where the joints are (when dampness settles into the bones of the joints, arthritis or rheumatism results), but is mostly a problem below the waist, as that is where gravity settles the dampness the most.

The source of the dampness may be environmental or dietary. If one contracts it while living in a dampish area, it was likely environmental. If one has long suffered from loose bowels and thirstlessness associated with Spleen Qi deficiency, it may have been dietary. Most often it was a combination of both.

Allergic causes

Recently, a patient of mine, a woman of forty one, had had a bad case of psoriasis since the age of 18. About a year ago we treated it and it almost completely disappeared. She was thrilled! Recently, however, due to a bit of stress it started to come back. We did a course of herbs and it subsided again, but she decided it was time to look at allergic causes to her problem.

We found a number of agents that were clearly allergens, but the most obvious ones relating to blood were minerals and iron. So, I put those first and foremost. We gave elimination treatments for both and in the 24 hour period following we had two vivid detoxifying encounters. She remembered a time when she was 14 years old and was thrown from a horse, landed face down, and came up with a mouth full of dirt (minerals). The second was a time when she was very sick and her mother gave her an iron pill and she threw it up violently.

Since that detoxification period her skin has cleared dramatically. She also noticed that she no longer had reactions after a bath or when drinking water or eating green vegetables.

Clearing yourself of a long-term skin disease is never done in an instant, and it truly involves a passage into changing your energies in order to clear the external symptoms.

Copyright © Joel Whitehead. This document may only be modified for technical reasons (e.g., compatibility with other platforms), but the actual content of this page may not be changed. One electronic copy and one paper copy may be made for personal use, but this document may not be distributed under any form, in whole or in part.

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