Q. I suffer from psoriasis, the skin disease, and I was wondering what creams or other products you recommend.

A. Psoriasis is a common skin condition that affects 2% of the population. Two percent means “two people in a hundred,” so, worldwide, that means roughly a hundred million patients.

Q. So what is the problem with the skin of all these people? Why don’t their bodies make perfect skin?

A. The answer lies in a failure of the immune system. In a third of patients there may be a hereditary factor and, in 40% of patients, it can be induced by stress. Our immune system controls the way we fight infections, diseases, cancer, etc. and, if it fails, a host of problems can arise.

Q. What creams do you recommend?

I am sure you will have seen your GP and possibly a consultant dermatologist (skin specialist) and have been offered, and used, various prescription creams and ointments. Depending on the severity of your psoriasis, you will have experienced varying degrees of success and may have also received oral treatment for more severe forms of the condition.

Many of the prescription creams/ointments, (with or without oral treatment), often give very good results, but there are definitely a lot of people who don’t always get the very good improvement that they would really like, and this is where medicine supplementation may be helpful in helping to maintain healthy skin.

If we go back to discussing the underlying failure of the immune system, we find that one of the main factors that keeps coming up relates to a particular substance (which we all produce as part of our inflammatory process), called interleukin-6. This substance is produced in our bones, by our stem cells, and is involved in the production of deliberately initiated inflammation. Why would we intentionally cause inflammation to occur? The reason is that if we have, for example, a wood chip in the skin, our immune system automatically activates the stem cells to produce the right cells to loosen the wood by causing the cells around the wound to swell and rupture. subsequently. down from the actual skin allowing the wood chip to be pushed to the surface of the skin and fall off, the inflammatory process would stop, the skin would heal, settle and the wound area would heal and could be left practically as one less scar.

But an excessive production of interleukin-6 cells, in people with psoriasis, will cause a continuous production of defective cells, relentlessly. It is as if these defective cells “think” that after only four days of development, they are “ready” to take their place in the skin.

Whereas normal, fully developed cells take twenty-eight days to reach perfection. Therefore, these “I’m ready in four days” faulty cells lead to the typical production of faulty skin, which causes inflammation, redness, and plaque. Inflammation, when it occurs around a splinter, is completely normal and acceptable and will have started to get the splinter out of the body, but with psoriasis production continues.

So what complementary products are available to help maintain healthy skin in this condition? I have found that the following have helped patients maintain more normal skin.

Moducare capsules contain vegetable fats obtained from the sap of a pine tree in South Africa. Professor Patrick Bouic is Professor of Immunology at the University of Cape Town and his work, over the last twenty-five years, with ingredients in the sap called sterols and sterolin glycosides, may help restore the balance between two of the cells that They are produced in our bone. medulla called TH1 and TH2.

It is the excessive production of TH2 cells that leads to the formation of faulty skin cells that we experience in people with psoriasis and taking Moducare capsules can help stabilize this production back to normal.

Omega 3 fish oil capsules

Similarly, we can learn from observing the diet of the Eskimos that the omega 3 ingredient found in the meat of oily fish (and oily fish is an important part of their diet) leads, once again, as in the story by Moducare, to achieve a much better balance in your immune system, and in fact, although 2% of Eskimos also have the potential, genetically, to get psoriasis, there is no word in their language for psoriasis!

Calcium pantothenate capsules

This substance is also known as vitamin B5, the anti-stress vitamin, and among the many pathways in our body that it is involved in is the pathway for the production of our own anti-stress ingredient, cortisol.

Bio-Pycnogenol

This little tablet is made in France from the same pine that Moducare is made from in South Africa, but here they use the bark of the tree, whose ingredients do three main things to help maintain healthy skin:

(1) It helps prevent the enzyme called collagenase from breaking down collagen in the skin.

(2) It helps prevent the enzyme called elastase from breaking down elastin (which gives our skin its elasticity) in our skin.

(3) It helps in the production of a substance called Endothelial Relaxing Substance which is needed to maintain a good blood supply to our skin.

Common Milk Thistle Capsules

This herb has a very good reputation for keeping our liver, which is the largest organ in the body, in good health and is the main organ of detoxification.

Finally, it is good to take a general vitamin and mineral supplement every day, as it is well documented in the literature that many people have low levels of magnesium, chromium, zinc, selenium, vitamin D, etc., all of which are important for maintaining healthy health. healthy skin.