Making friends with psoriasis sufferers.

Do cleaning supplies agitate your psoriasis?

 Sometimes when I'm on social networking sites, or hell, even dating sites, I like to search for people with psoriasis, and send them messages, just to talk to real people who have it. I only have friends who have eczema, none who have psoriasis, so all I ever get to learn about it is what I hear or read online. Sometimes it's nice to be able to talk to someone else who is going through the same situation as you and compare notes. 

This particular person has it really bad. She lives in the UK and sometimes posts little journal entrees about her life dealing with psoriasis. I sent her a msg to see if she knew anything helpful, and she did have some very good tips:

Hello Travis,

My advice:

- Don't smoke - my psoriasis was much better after I quit but deteriorated again when I started smoking again. Smoking starves your skin of oxygen as it constricts blood flow.
- Give up caffeine. I know how difficult this one is, I've been there but it really does have a hugely beneficial effect.
- reduce your dairy to a minimum, I have as much milk/yoghurt/cheese as I need nutritionally for calcium intake but no more (and I have always loved dairy products!).
- Cook your food from scratch, convenience foods are a killer because of the added chemicals such as emulsifiers.
- Cut down the chemicals in your home. Seriously. the less harmful chemicals in the air, the better. I use incense rather than air freshener, a damp cloth rather than furniture polish (beezwax is great on good quality wood but expensive and labour intensive), a cheap washing powder (fewer optical brighteners and perfumes) and a pure fabric conditioner, a grapefruit based detergent for cleaning my bathroom and kitchen surfaces, bleach for the toilet and washing up liquid. Most of my friends and exes have cupboards and bathrooms full of fancy cleaning products, many of which are aerosols and great at cleaning but all of that hanging in the air really isn't good for your skin.
- I moisturise with olive oil, it may mean I smell like a Greek salad but it is great for my skin :o)
- Use dead sea salt products where you can - at the very least just sea salt in the bath. It stings if your psoriasis is bad but it really helps (I have been known to swim in the sea at midnight in January when going through a really bad phase!).
- Try to make plenty of you time and relax - stress is the worst.

I eat particularly well, I buy my fruit and veg off the market and cook from scratch, I should have more oily fish but otherwise, my diet is great. Don't get me wrong, I regularly bake and don't miss out on anything, I even have coffee once a day but cutting out the crap has made a huge difference. Lots of exercise helps too as that stimulates blood flow to the skin and increases the oxygen that it gets.

In January, it was the worst I have ever known it, it came up so fast that it felt like chemical burns and I couldn't turn my head or smile/yawn/laugh without my skin splitting and burning. People were looking at me horribly in the streets and in shops. I had to use a hydra-gel injected burns dressing (bought at considerable cost on the black market as it isn't available to the public) just to be able to get my clothes on. It was purely down to stress and I ended up with the late night swims and using sunbeds to fight it. As a rule though, I don't suffer too badly and most of the time, you would barely know that I had it.

The lifestyle changes weren't difficult to do and over the last few years, I have gotten so used to living and eating this way that I find certain things that I once enjoyed almost insulting to the nostrils/tastebuds!

I hope your skin isn't too bad and that you can at least keep it to a manageable level.

I hope that helped and wasn't condescending, I don't knnow how much of that you already do!

Take care and good luck,

-Name Withheld