Happy New Year!

Solveeczema has always been a hobby for me — an important one, but nevertheless, something I was never able to devote enough time to.  Getting the site going took over a year and very real personal sacrifice.  I had a lot of help, too.  But once I’d written the initial articles about our experience, I felt a responsibility to the hundreds of people who wrote asking for more information.

The feedback I’ve gotten since then has been amazing — there is nothing like hearing you have helped to suddenly and dramatically make a child’s life better — which has kept me thinking about how to take this endeavor beyond this simple amateur web site.

Just keeping the site over the years has been more than I bargained for.  Beyond the costs, I haven’t been able to keep up with email, I have had perpetual problems with updates because the site is published on Comcast, and making updates and changes has been an exercise in extreme patience (and sometimes futility).  This past year, Comcast changed its home page and along with its “improvements”, I lost the ability to log on to my accounts using a browser, any browser, at all.  I have been unable to check my spam folders or to update the Solveeczema site since.

A Solveeczema user recently made a donation large enough for me to consider a real web hosting package through Network Solutions for a year.  I am hopeful I can do this in January or February.  This will significantly help when I have updates to the site, but it won’t improve my time or my ability to reach or help more people by much.   My ultimate goal is a study, scientific support for a solution.

I haven’t written about that much because there are still many hurdles, but I have over the years been slowly taking concrete steps toward this goal.  A number of people early on offered (indeterminate) financial support for a study, but I wasn’t in a position to take them up on it.  That’s changing.

If you have benefited from Solveeczema and are in a position to be an angel — of the beneficent winged type as opposed to the early venture capital type — please contact me through the Solveeczema web site for a proposal.  (Click on the “feedback” link under “Questions and Feedback” on the Solveeczema home page.)

Rates of eczema, allergy, and asthma continue to rise worldwide, and I believe I can pinpoint why.  If you have used this site to good effect, you know I am serious.  Rates of eczema in some towns in Sweden have now topped 40% (researchers determined it to be something about the indoor home environment…)  The amount of effort and money going into developing, testing, and evaluating just “measurement instruments” for eczema severity and quality of life is staggering.

I hope somewhere out there is an angel who sees the promise of demonstrating a true solution as worth a small fraction of that.