Evening primrose oil is known to beneficial for exzema/Neurodermatitis. You're going to hate me for this but, dare I say it,....... homeopathy?

Is Sudocreme the swiss equivalent of Silcocks ?

Or you can go to a German pharmacy (if you're near a border) and grab a huge tub of the stuff for around 3 euros. Lasts me about a year.

I had eczema some years ago, used green argil (green clay) to heal it.

We always have green argil at home, it works for everything having to do with the skin or more.

Just an amazing substance....

Thank you all for your comments, PMs and suggestions.



You may dare... I nearly put in a "no homeopathy" line in my original post. Herbal, yes, homeopathy, no... but anyway, I don't hate. There's not many people I hate, and you're definitely not one of them

evening primrose is available in oil form as well, not easy to give to a toddler, but you may be able to explain that it'll help the itching and stuff if they just take a spoonful... also, you may find some primrose oil that is child friendly- with a flavor of some sort added, if you look a bit on the internet. i remember seeing one in a natural store in ny a while back, if i think of the company i'll post it later on...

I can totally relate to the difficulty of finding anything that works.

We are really struggling with our daughter's eczema, which has flared up on her face since last summer, and keeps going on and on.

Avene - made it worse
Paediatrician did skin testing but wouldn't agree with diagnosis of allergy to tomatoes (but she had pizza and pasta sauce in the same day and had a massive flare-up several hours later)...
Cortisone - works and then she flares within half a day of skipping the cream, she is also getting secondary infections (fungal or bacterial, not sure) which I believe can be a side-effect of cortisone.

We ended up getting the cream sent over from Australia that she used when she was a baby (the brand is called 'EGO' and it's owned and run by a family of dermatologists, who are family friends of ours)...but that wasn't enough to prevent the secondary infection that she now has.

Last week I decided to give it a rest, and just tolerate it and wait a week...next week is school holidays and we'll go onto the diet that worked when she was a baby - no tomato, no strawberries, no kiwi fruit, no stone fruits, avoid MSG, no preservatives, no salicylates...and see if we can get it finally to heal...

Aromat is a complete disaster for her (and for me!). Pineapple can also be a problem...

Most of the things we found over a period of trial-and-error - it took about 2 years from when she was 2 to when she was 4 to eliminate from her diet until we found the triggers.

She has extremely high immune reactivity and when she has a flare up her tolerance is very low - usually if she avoids the main triggers for a few weeks or months, then she can handle more things from the 'allergy' list - but when she has a flare up, she has to really go back to the restricted diet until her body heals...

Our main ones that definitely trigger are tomatoes, strawberries and stone fruits...

I got eczema quite badly on the back of my knees about 2 winters ago here. It itched like crazy. I tried zinc cream, Louis Widmer's Remederm, etc. etc. but all those creams only seemed to make it worse. Then I finally went to a doctor about it, and she prescribed for me a cream called Triderm. It worked wonders. I'm not sure whether or not it is suitable for children, though, because I think it is a steroidal cream. But I do know that it was the only thing that both relieved the itching AND also cured me.

http://purepotions.biz/

This small business is apparently the product of a mother whose child had such bad eczema she was unable to sleep. She had the same problem that conventional treatment either had no effect or worsened the problem. The mother apparently spent hours late a night boiling random herbs together and pasting them over her child until she hit on something that worked.


I have no direct experience or affiliation with it... but it's been wildly successful in the UK I believe and is sold for a very reasonable price. Dunno how you'd manage to import it.

you may dare.......I will back you up!
My 6year old daughter has eczema on the insides of her elbow, for a year now, tried everything the doc gave me, and a few herbal creams - Comfrey cream. I have been seeing a homeopath, because she has alot of problems, with her digestive system - more on the diarrhea side. The last remedy, has gotten the eczema cleared, 90% in one week!
I'm quite impressed.

My mother, brother, sister, my two children, my sisters daughter and I get eczema from all the fruit you mentioned. Oranges included. My mother also gets it from dairy cream. The only way we keep the eczema at bay is by avoiding these foods. My siblings and I can have the odd tomato here and there or piece of pineapple with no effect. We just need to make sure we don't overdo it. We use a cortisone for two days or so when it gets really bad but try to not use the stuff often.

@CarlosR, perhaps try and see if certain foods, clothing detergents and body lotions/soaps aggravate his condition.. Poor little fella, it really is a miserable ailment to suffer from

Pather: Just curious,
is her digestion better? Did she change her diet?
I think that eczema and digestion problems are only a couple of the problems related to intolerance to some foods. Until I began adjusting my daughter's diet and was able to figure out what she tolerates the least (wheat and milk), she also had dark rings around her eyes, was tired all the time, had tons of earwax. Sounds strange, but as soon as I began to give her the foods that worked best for her, she became a different person. Proof for me, is that as soon as she overdoes any of these foods, her symptoms return.
I'm no expert, but I think cortisone does the trick, but only covers the symptoms for a while instead of fixing the problem. (So the skin looks better, but what about all the other things going on inside the body?)

__________________
www.kokoandkalila.com

Hey Carlos,

I have worked a bit (as a student up till now) with eczema and dermatitis from an alternative health perspective (was studying Nutritional Medicine) and have seen the best results come from dealing with the underlying cause as to why the child is erupting on their skin rather than detoxing through the normal routes of digestion.

This is why simply putting creams on the surface of the skin simply won't work in the long term, because the reaction is coming from the inside of the body, not the skin itself, and therefore anything you put on the outside just suppresses the reaction, rather than actually dealing with what is causing it. If you can cut off the source you then stop it from happening all together.

Usually it is to do with their digestion, as that should be the normal route of excretion of irritants (any skin condition is usually linked with the body's immune system and inability to detox, which is in turn linked in very much with the person's liver function and bowel health - meaning the presence of healthy bacteria in the bowel, or not)

So in my experience, often what happens when kids get constant dermatitis or eczema, and the creams aren't working, it is a sign of compromised digestion.

Usually this starts with having lower than normal stomach acid which then predisposes their bodies to not digesting foods (mainly protein containing foods) properly, which allows those foods to cause problems further down in the digestive tract. (they can be a seemingly random assortment, which is why allergy tests often don't seem that helpful or show anything concrete because the child often reacts to all sorts of things)

Check out this article about stomach acid and its importance, it might give you some clues as to what is possibly happening or do some article searching about low stomach acid and eczema or skin conditions :

http://www.puristat.com/coloncleansi...omachacid.aspx

I would suggest taking your child off the 2 biggest culprits in terms of food irritants, even if you don't manage to do anything about his stomach acid directly, for a couple weeks and seeing if that improves anything at all - wheat and all processed foods tend to have the biggest impact on disrupting digestion, so if you can get your child off wheat and sweets, cookies, breads etc...for a trial run and see if that makes a difference. The other culprits are often soy and dairy, but not as often.


In terms of actually helping to improve your child's digestion, you could try doing several things - giving nutrients that help naturally stimulate stomach acid production, like zinc, vitamin c, making sure he eats enough salt, eats enough protein, b12, b6 and other vitamins...there are several involved so it would be worth testing (I can do that in a consultation) which ones he needs the most.

My suggestion would be to give your child a good digestive enzyme supplement designed for kids to help break down the foods properly, as well as a potent probiotic supplement to help repopulate the gut with healthy bacteria which will help protect against any detox problems, and hence, the reactions coming out on the skin.


If you need suggestions of which products work great, I can send you to a website in the states where I get all my supplements because it is the best and cheapest quality and shipping I can find to Switzerland, just let me know.

There is too much to suggest, but if you would like to contact me directly you can, I have now finished my studies and am just waiting for my diploma to show up, so can do consultations if you would like to have a proper one and I can assess your child's health properly and follow you up and see what we can do about his skin condition. :-) Just PM me if interested.

Hope these suggestions help a bit! Have a great day!

Got it at the moment - never had it before I was late 20s tho. Think the diet stuff is all very sound, as there is a growing school of thought that thinks it's actually a fungal infection. So, a reasonably natural treatment is to bathe twice daily in sodium bicarb & dead sea salts. Seems to be helping for me.

On that basis, you'd also want to avoid anti-biotics and candida feedstuffs such as sugar, refined carbs (no wheat, sorry), caffeine, alcohol (latter two shouldn't be too hard for a nipper!). A course of pro-biotics will also help (got mine from http://www.naturopharma.com/)

For further diet advice can recommend both Zoe Harcombe and Gudrun Jonsson.

As an adult, I do suffer from quite severe eczema behind my needs, and only steroidal cream really helps. The one I use is called Elocom.

When my son was a baby, he had atopic skin problems, and here are his ped's advice which helped quite a lot:
- oatmeal bath
- do not bathe the child everyday. It only makes the skin drier, and worsens the problems.
- keep the bath warm but not too hot (not over 37°), and not more than 10 min.

We use Anti-Dry Lotion (mentioned in my previous post) for little one. A week ago I changed to SOS lotion with Calendula Oil from Nivea - purely because it was around and I didn't have to buy immediately a new bottle of Anti-Dry - and it's really good at keeping the skin protected and prevents drying out the respective patches of skin. Plus Nivea is much cheaper.

Eczema can be a bit of a nightmare not matter what age group. As an MD, I'd like to add a few comments:

Evening primrose oil as well as borage oil used internally are indeed worth a try. Please note that evening primrose oil may not be used in infants. The child takes one teaspoon of the oil daily (mix it in with food, often is eaten better then).

Zinc ointments are also very helpful. Just make sure they don't contain vaseline. Vaseline will block pores and can thus cause dry skin.

Salt or even better: sea salt (dead sea salt is recommended, available in CH)
(not just good as a decongestant but also anti-inflammatory)
For baths, use 0.5 kg of salt per 200l water (big tub two-thirds full). The water should be slightly cooler than usually. Bath no longer than 10 minutes at the beginning, and careful dap skin dry afterwards, do not rub. The amount of salt and the duration of the bath can be increased later on in the treatment process.

Another good thing, as mentioned are oatmeal baths. They are mild and usually well tolerated by children. Follow Melusine's advice, bathing in general daily is not good and water should always be a few degrees cooler than a normal bath.

Even lavender can help: it's antiseptic and can help with open wounds. You mix 12 drops essential lavender oil with 100 ml distilled water, mix it well and place compresses on the affected area. You can even mix some almond oil in with the lavender oil.

Finally, not as pleasant as the mentioned methods but also very successful: compresses with oak bark (Eichenrinde): make an infusion of 10 g of the bark, available at health food stores and some pharmacies, and 250ml cold water. Bring mix to a boil, allow to infuse for 10 minutes, drain and allow to cool. Dab a compress or cloth in the "tea" and place on affected areas. LEave for no longer than 10 minutes (you can even drink the tea). Be aware that oak bark causes a discoloration of anything is get onto. I do not recommend oak bark baths for kids, they are too strong. Sometimes, after an oak bark treatment, the skin seems to get worse first and then improves drastically. patience is needed.

I hope this helps.

Sorry, forgot to mention that with any baths described, do not use soap or other cleaning products at the same time.

Yes - comfrey cream, or coal tar products for hair.
And Sudocrem (manufactured in Ireland, sold everywhere in UK) is a white zinc cream.
Fantastic for nappy rash and just about everything else!!

The paediatrician wouldn't prescribe anything for our lo as he was under a year at the time. He told us to use bepanthen nappy cream on it (the one in the pink tube) and this always cleared it up.

We bath him every night (in camomile, no soap unless he's really filthy!) then body lotion him before putting him in pj's. Since we started using the body shop baby buritti butter he's had no more eczema flare-ups.