Grappling with the "cost" of fundraising

With my last post, I began a temporary experiment with fundraising. I’ve been thinking about doing something for awhile, because the domain name renewals for solveeczema.org and solveeczema.com come up in a few months.  I’d like to renew for five or ten years, but it’s costly in such big chunks (even though the per-year cost goes down).  Also, while I’m at it, I was hoping to transfer hosting to a better service, updating the site is just so arduous at the moment, I am rarely able to do it.

I have to admit that I have also wondered if I could duplicate some of the blogging stories I have read about lately, where bloggers have gotten enough donations to devote more time to their blogs.

However, I have also read that when a connection to a pay site like paypal links from your site, it’s standing in the search engines drops (for certain kinds of sites).   Whether it’s true or just coincidence, visits to this blog dropped an order of magnitude when I put the donations button up.  I also lost a subscriber.  I put up the site in the first place to help people; the donations button came out of my considering how I could afford to keep doing that and maybe do more, but I seem to be bumbling that attempt. 

I plan on removing the donations button in two or three months anyway, and leaving it off, especially if I am able to renew the domain name for several years.  Please consider a small donation to support the solveeczema site and this blog.  Given what has happened, I don’t think I will be putting a donations button on the solveeczema.org site after all.

Temporary Pledge Drive

I am experimenting with a temporary donations button on this blog – and hopefully soon, on the solveeczema website – to ask for support to renew the domain names and transfer the site to a better web hosting service in a few months.

If possible, I also hope to afford to devote more time to updating the site, answering emails and questions, and maintaining the blog on a more regular basis. (In the interest of full disclosure, I will not be able to spend full-time with this no matter what the level of support. But I will be able to do far more than the small, spare moments I can offer now.)

This is a small blog; small donations are welcome!

If, however, someone has the means and desire to be a major angel, I would add the following wish list:

1) Funds to subscribe to relevant online dermatology and microbiology scientific journals – to help me finish a scientific article sooner.

2) Support a study! In the past year, more than one doctor has offered to help conduct a study. I have had little ability to follow up. (If you can fund a study, please write to me through the “Feedback” heading/link on my home page. Rather than donating to me directly – solveeczema.org is a simple volunteer effort, not an official non-profit, so donations are not tax deductible – we could arrange for you to donate to the institution where the study would be conducted, where it would more likely be deductible.)

I have to admit that I am not very comfortable asking for donations, I hope it does not make my readers uncomfortable. The web site needs more than I have been able to give to it; I would like to do much more.

When I solved my son’s eczema, I was unable to keep up with questions and requests for help from friends and acquaintances, so I wrote a few articles. When the articles were published, I was inundated with requests for information, so I put up the solveeczema web site.

I can see from feedback that the site is doing a tremendous amount of good. I hear from people all over the world that the information helped them understand and eliminate a child’s or their own eczema. More than one doctor has told me that they refer patients to the information. I can see that this solution is consistent with a plethora of existing scientific literature.

I will take the whole thing to the next step sooner or later – a scientific paper, a study, etc. – thus I am experimenting with donations to see if I can make that happen “sooner.”

[Donation button disabled – please see side bar.]

Not an allergic reaction to detergents

Eczema from detergents – per solveeczema.org – is caused by how detergents affect skin membrane permeability and function and is not a true IgE-mediated allergy to detergents. In fact, very few people (if any) have a true allergy to detergents, most detergent allergies are actually allergies to product enzymes and additives. Sodium lauryl sulfate, known to be highly problematic for people with eczema, is a detergent analog of a surfactant our bodies make and use to regulate membrane permeability, among other things. I’m not sure we even could be allergic to it in the true sense; again, the eczema comes about from how it affects the skin membrane.

Thus you could not test for detergent reactivity with traditional allergy blood tests. Initially I sometimes used the word “allergy” in regards to this reaction, with some justification, but it’s not a true allergic reaction to the detergents themselves.

Pets get eczema, too

Early on in my search for soaps, I asked a local saddlery about products. I must have had the term “saddle soap” in the back of my mind – I figured I’d find soap products for washing horses that would likely be fine for humans, too.

I was surprised to find that all of the products available for washing horses were detergent-based, most using sodium lauryl sulfate. I did a little hunting on the web, only to find that horses are having eczema problems in recent years, especially certain breeds. Family pets get eczema, too – You don’t even necessarily have to wash them to expose them to detergents, they get significant exposure just from detergents in modern household dust.

And it sure seems to me from everything I have read that the underlying causes (plural) as outlined on my site are the same as in humans. Makes sense.

I hear myself say this over and over, but … Although my site is geared to parents of babies with severe eczema – people who need to see rapid and dramatic results for infants who have the most permeable skin – if you read and understand the underlying issues, it’s possible to make sense of and solve eczema in pets.

I don’t know if eczema in pets makes them less cute and cuddly and more likely to be abandoned or worse (especially since detergent-caused eczema would be present early on), or if current trends of offering more advanced medical care to pets would make caring for a pet with eczema more common. The information I can find about eczema in family pets is very sketchy, so I fear the former may be an issue. I’d love to know more about the problem from anyone who works with animals.

Please contact me through the web site, via the feedback links on the home page.

http://www.solveeczema.org

New vs. Old Unscented Dove

For comparison, here are the formulas of the new unscented Dove Sensitive Skin bar products (not okay per the solveeczema.org site) and the old unscented Dove product (fine per the solveeczema.org site):

Old formula (fine per solveeczema):
Sodium cocoyl isethionate
Stearic acid
Coconut acid
Sodium tallowate
Sodium isethionate
Water
Sodium stearate
Cocamidopropyl betaine
Sodium cocoate or sodium palm kernelate
Sodium chloride
Masking fragrance
Tetrasodium EDTA
Tetrasodium etidronate
BHT
Titanium dioxide

New Dove unscented Sensitive Skin formula (not okay per solveeczema web site):
Sodium lauroyl isethionate
Stearic acid
Sodium tallowate or sodium palmitate
Lauric acid
Sodium isethionate
Water
Sodium stearate
Cocamidopropyl betaine
Sodium cocoate or sodium palm kernelate
Sodium chloride
Tetrasodium EDTA
Tetrasodium etidronate
Maltol
Titanium dioxide

Recommendation for Dove Withdrawn Until Further Notice

    Until further notice, I must withdraw my recommendation for Dove bar products. (I have never recommended the liquid products.)

    For general use, and especially for “the washing test” on the solveeczema.org web site, I no longer recommend using Dove or any bar products with the same surfactant formula as Dove’s current unscented Sensitive Skin product, the formula of which was changed as of January 2007. See previous posts on this blog for more information.

    Initially, there were several products with the same surfactant formula as the OLD unscented Dove formula with sodium cocoyl isethionate (give or take a few fragrances and colors), but they, too, seem to be changing over to the new surfactant formula with sodium lauroyl isethionate.

    Here’s the problem:

    I can recommend that people use any soap product, because soaps are a very narrowly defined surfactant. Thus, I can say that all soaps, provided they are relatively non-drying (and there are MANY non-drying soaps) should be fine for people with detergent-reactive eczema (also provided there are no individual ingredient allergies).

    Without getting into a detailed discussion about Dove, empirically, unscented Dove, a combination of mild detergents, soaps, and fatty acids, was also fine. It was more than fine, actually, it worked especially beautifully to remove existing detergents on the skin that are a problem for people with detergent-reactive eczema.

    Unfortunately, I have no such empirical information about the new formula. In fact, the majority of visits to my blog these days appear to be from people trying to figure out what happened to the old unscented Dove formula. I have received several reports of problems, though I cannot draw conclusions until I know much, much more.

    The old unscented Dove product had lots and lots of empirical support, not just from those who successfully used my site, but from dermatologists’ experiences over many years. I have no idea why Dove’s maker would want to monkey with this successful product line.

    Until further notice, instead of unscented Dove for the “washing test” on the solveeczema.org web site, use Cal Ben’s liquid dish glow from a foaming dispenser. (Do not use it straight as it is quite concentrated.) Rinse especially well. As always, spot test it first to determine personal sensitivity to the ingredients.