What is Eczema?
According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, eczema is defined as ‘an inflammatory condition of the skin characterized by redness, itching and oozing vesicular lesions which become scaly, crusted or hardened’.
This basic dictionary definition immediately gives you some idea that eczema is not a pleasant condition to suffer from. Eczema has been around for thousands of years, but sadly, modern medical science is no nearer to curing eczema than were our forefathers.
Like many skin complaints, eczema is one of those things that most people end up treating on a superficial or skin level, primarily because medical science tends to adopt the same attitude.
However, because we are looking for a way of dealing with eczema totally naturally, many of the solutions you will read of in this book adopt a far more holistic approach to getting rid of or at least minimizing the worst effects of eczema.
While there are lots of things that you can do on a topical level (on the surface) that will reduce the severity of eczema using only natural substances, I’m also going to dig down into some other ways that you can deal with your eczema from the inside, rather than doing so only on an external level.
Before moving on to start looking at various treatments that you can use to deal with your eczema problem, let us look in a little more detail at what the condition is, and who gets it.
Eczema is an equal opportunities condition
Like many other skin conditions such as psoriasis and dandruff, there is a great deal about eczema that is still a mystery to us.
For example, because eczema refers to a set of clinical characteristics rather than one particular condition, the definition of the underlying causes of eczema has often been unsystematic and haphazard (at best). Indeed, over the years, there have been many different terms and names that have been used for the condition, as dozens of so-called experts have come up with their own definitions of what eczema is and what it is not.
Partially as a result of this confusion, eczema is a condition that is often mixed up with psoriasis. However, the two conditions are not identical, the main difference between the two being that adult eczema is often found on the flexor aspect of body joints (those body parts on the inside of a joint that can decrease in size or surface area because of flexing) while psoriasis is generally not found in these particular areas.
What is generally agreed is that eczema is a form of dermatitis. Dermatitis in turn is used as a ‘catch-all’ term for any inflammation of the epidermis, which is the outermost layer of the human skin.
Consequently, for many non-medical professionals, the two words eczema and dermatitis are almost interchangeable, and (just to confuse things a little further) you will also hear eczema referred to as eczematous dermatitis or dermatitis eczema.
If you are anything like me, all of this extra ‘helpful’ information will probably do far more to confuse you than provide any clearer picture of what eczema is and what it isn’t. This is primarily because all we really know about eczema is that it is an inflammation of the skin, which doesn’t really tell you great deal more than you already knew when you started.
