Introduction & Looking to Manage Eczema Without Steroids

[Jack-Gill-SGS]

Hello,

My name's Jack, I'm a 21 year old male graduate located in the UK.
I've had eczema for about three years now (I think) I've always been fairly prone to skin disease (have suffered from athletes foot and similar since I was a child) but in particular my eczema started becoming a problem when I started university (moving away, feeding myself, it's all stress!) and it's been present on my hands and forearms ever since then. Around two years ago I started to get it on my face and neck, and turned into a little bit of a shut in due to being fairly self-conscious about it, which actually really just made it worse.

I recently left university and almost immediately started a small game development company, for which I am the managing director, which means I do a lot of public facing, PR and sales stuff. In the five weeks or so since I have been doing this, my eczema has gotten substantially worse. There is now no large area of my body that doesn't feature eczema to some extent!

In regards to the title, I have used topical steroids for my eczema throughout my life. I have found that over time they have become less and less useful (as seems to be the case for a lot of sufferers!) Most recently, upon coming to the end of a two week course of steroids for the eczema on my neck, a large area around the area I was treating suddenly bloomed with fresh, horrible eczema, and so to a large extent I'm swearing off steroids as much as I can.

Having recently suffered a bit of a breakdown from stress caused by my work and my eczema, and the effects of each on the other, my lovely family convinced me to come home and take a bit of a break. I've decided to try and use that time to do some research into eczema and how people cope.

I'm currently looking into stress relief techniques, dietary recommendations and alternative treatments for my eczema. To this end I have started a food/eczema diary, wherein I'll be recording what I eat, how my eczema is, and also keeping count of the number of times I scratch per day (an interesting suggestions I found somewhere else on the interwebs) And, of course, writing this post is also hopefully part of my search! I'd be incredibly grateful if anyone would share with me what they've found to be useful, and also I'm more than happy to just generally talk to anyone else about their experience, and mine.

And of course I'll check back on this thread to report how my diary is working, whatever happens!

Thanks for reading, apologies for all the words!

Jack

[Marcie Mom]

Hi Jack!

Congrats on starting your own company and it's good to stay a break! Stress definitely affects skin, so looking at stress relief techniques sound like a good idea. The counting of scratches can help to combat habitual scratching but bottom line is the eczema has to get better first. Patch test, reducing staph bacteria measures and diet wise, less trans fat, sugar and more omega3.. let us know how everything works out!

Cheers,
Mei

[Jack-Gill-SGS]

I will, and thank you for the diet suggestions, I will take those into account!