Over the years, I have been thanked by many people who used SolveEczema.org just to solve a dry skin problem, even if they did not have eczema. I have been thanked by many parents and more than one doctor who realized they could wash their hands frequently when necessary, without drying their skin out. As I am very clear about on my website, I am not a doctor, this is based on my own personal observation and research. Getting results relies on capitalizing on that new perspective, so it is essential to understand that new perspective first.  (I also fundamentally approach things from a Safety First standpoint — I will never suggest doing anything in a way that should make anything worse, or that has to be “toughed out,” so it’s important to understand first AND always keep a doctor in the loop even if they don’t know the site, in case the unexpected happens.)

I am writing this to share what we — and now many others — have done using the Solveczema.org perspective to get unexpected, out-of-the-box results with ameliorating dry skin, for those who maybe can’t seem to find any moisturizing cream thick enough to prevent painful cracked skin during the winter or on travel, or who struggle with washing the dishes even with gloves.

Obviously, I can’t promise a “cure” without a traditional medical study, the title above is just a restatement of the usual idiom and my opinion about its applicability, although this is a perfect set up for a clinical study. I believe this perspective could not only improve the health of health providers’ skin, but also improve compliance with handwashing, and thus help reduce hospital-borne infection.

If you are ready to try this, first read the SolveEczema site disclaimer, watch the SolveEczema site video linked from the home page (note, I made it for a long-concluded crowdfunding for my book and haven’t been able to update the ending, it’s an amateur effort — sorry, it puts me to sleep, too — but it’s only about 45 minutes and is still a good summary of the site).  Read everything here, use your judgment, talk with your physician as needed for health and safety issues, and don’t make any changes until you understand how different this is.  It’s not about individual products, it’s about learning how to have optimal skin health without treatments or moisturizing, by understanding what, in my observation, is really going on.

I need to mention here again an open source paper I posted online about SolveEczema, giving a rough description of how it relates to the eczema and allergy epidemic of recent decades, and summarizing many of the novel observations:  https://thewinnower.com/papers/3412-abnormal-ampli-fication-observations-from-applying-the-engineering-method-to-solving-eczema-and-atopic-disease

It’s only two pages — please refer to the Analysis and Observations section for essential novel observations.

Again, with my apologies for the presumption of giving this a personal, alliterative name like this in hopes of making it more memorable, I also need to restate this very different-from-traditional view of why skin becomes dry after washing, per my own observations, because it’s crucial for getting results:

Photo of bar soap on soap tray

Lumsdaine’s Law: For most people, under most conditions, eczema and dry skin are more the result of what is left on the skin than what is stripped from the skin by washing.

 

 

Photo of dry hand skin

Photo of dry hand courtesy of Wikimedia

Water alone on the skin increases the membrane permeability. Membrane permeability is basically just how easily certain substances — like water molecules — can pass through the membrane, from within and without.  If you wash your hands in the winter and don’t dry them well afterwards, your hands chap even if you only washed in water, because the water left on the skin increases the permeability and accelerates water loss.

Under normal conditions, the restoration of water in the skin is quite rapid; if someone washes and it takes days for the skin to rehydrate, my contention is that it’s because of what is on the skin in the meantime, not usually from what was stripped from the skin by normal washing. Detergents on the skin (see the paper) in combination with a small layer of water, including from sweat, dramatically increases permeability and subsequent water loss.

Continued in Part 2…