From living with eczema to living without eczema

Learning how to live with eczema is important.

Living with eczema means understanding what eczema is, and what needs to be done about it.

Living with eczema also means discovering how to get on with life regardless, and not letting eczema cause added unhappiness and stress, either for the person who has it, or for others in their family.

Here are some important points about living with eczema from accounts given to the US National Eczema Association:

• Avoid letting eczema define who one is: “eczema is not who I am”
• Parenting, and coping with conflicting advice
• Listening to your skin: paying attention, meeting its needs
• Understanding the personality of the person with eczema
• Learning what to do, what not to do - for oneself: it's different for everyone

Living successfully with eczema means becoming one’s own expert: learning how to deal with one’s own eczema effectively. Chronic, longstanding eczema needs more than creams for effective treatment. With The Combined Approach, adding habit reversal for habitual scratching allows chronic eczema to melt away.

This then allows learning how to live without eczema…

Here are some important points about living without eczema from accounts in The Eczema Solution by Sue Armstrong-Brown:

• The programme enabled me to help myself
• My life is under control again
• Now I feel comfortable meeting people
• Looking back, I can hardly believe that was me
• It's like having a completely new skin

As Dr Peter Noren says…

“There is certainly no need to live with eczema: there is now a possibility to live without eczema”.


See also: Quality of Life and atopic eczema