We’re seeing a huge upsurge of eczema in my very busy Ayurvedic practice, especially among children. Let’s take a look at why the incidence is increasing and why current treatments are not effectively getting to the root of the problem.
My teacher and mentor for 20 years, Vaidya Rama Kant Mishra, one of India’s greatest Ayurvedic physicians, sat with me in my practice teaching me how to manage every disease that walked in the door. He came from a family lineage of Ayurvedic physicians dating back over 5,000 years.
His family’s specialty was always Dermatology and in fact legend has it they treated Lord Krishna’s son for leprosy. And Vaidya Mishra himself was a great dermatologist, which means he treated the whole body, not just the skin.
Let me explain. It is technically incorrect to think of eczema as a skin problem. The skin is the largest organ in the body, and it’s just doing what it knows how to do — it’s getting rid of toxins, all day, every day. It’s just that you don’t see the toxins as they are continually dumped out onto the skin. Unless they’re very hot. If they are hot they will cause all kinds of itching, burning and inflammation, creating almost any skin disease you can think of: contact dermatitis, psoriasis, eczema, even autoimmune diseases of the skin, for example.
The wrong way to treat eczema is by giving a steroid cream externally on the skin or taking them internally, or both. Yes, the eczema might clear up, and it might be OK to do that in a crisis situation where you can’t take the itching and inflammation anymore. But to get to the root of the problem you have to address several issues. So let’s start at the beginning.
When the mother is pregnant with her baby, she is exposing the baby to all the toxins she came in contact with over her whole entire lifetime — toxins from the air pollution, pharmaceuticals she might have taken in the past, bad oils, bad milk, bad water, fast foods, foods sprayed with pesticides, and processed foods.
In fact when a baby is born, it has been noted that they already contain about 200 chemicals in their blood. But during the early childhood years babies get rid of those toxins through the skin by getting the childhood diseases like rubella, mumps, and chicken pox. Getting these diseases might not feel great, but it’s a necessary rite of passage the child must go through to get rid of the toxins they accumulated from their mother.
Nowadays babies no longer get these minor childhood diseases because they’re no longer circulating within the population. As a result, the toxins continue to sit in their cells and new toxins come into their bodies with the astounding amount of pharmaceuticals they’re exposed to between their highly rigorous vaccination schedule combined with the overuse of antibiotics and other medications.
So if toxins come into the body, they must eventually come out. And they come out through the bowel movement, the urine and the sweat. You won’t see them in the bowel movement and the urine, but you will see them on the skin as they come out through the sweat.
The reason you see them on the skin is because they are very hot and acidic. Just like alkaline rain which picks up the chemicals as it goes through the air pollution, turning it into acid rain — the same thing is happening inside our bodies — these acid chemicals burn the skin as they come through the delicate pores.
I remember when Dr. Mishra had first come from India: at that time people in the villages were eating very healthy and the children didn’t have the exposure to the high amounts of pharmaceuticals we have in this country. He was in shock at the amount of toxins he found through pulse diagnosis in the children he saw. He told me that the amount of toxins the four year olds had in their tissues would normally have taken a whole lifetime to accumulate — much like the pulse of a 70-year-old.
He concluded that it was the nasty diet the children were raised on combined with the over- exposure to pharmaceuticals that created this huge amount of toxicity.
So their skin was doing them a favor, getting rid of as many toxins as it could.
He taught me how to correctly treat these children and also adults who were streaming into our office every week suffering from weeping, itching and highly inflammatory eczema.
First, like any disease, you have to trace its origins all the way back to faulty digestion: if digestion isn’t working properly then the food sits undigested in the gut, fermenting and forming an acid toxin, which adds to the acid chemical toxins already coming out through the skin. The pharmaceuticals the children take in the early childhood years destroy the friendly bacteria in the gut, so we must first regrow that, as it is needed to properly digest and assimilate the nutrients from the food they eat.
Next, we have to cool the heat in the liver, as it is overwhelmed from all these hundreds of toxins circulating through it — don’t forget — it’s the main filter of toxins and as acid toxins are going through it every day it ends up overheating. But — the liver makes the blood from the food you eat, so now the blood becomes overheated which in turn heat up the toxins sitting in the blood forming eczema once they come out onto the skin.
You can actually feel this heat in both the liver and the blood when you take their pulse. In America we just feel the rate and rhythm of the heartbeat in the pulse. But in Ayurvedic pulse analysis, you can determine the different types of toxins, where they have travelled to, all the organs and glands, the health of the 7 tissues and much much more information.
And, like the friendly bacteria in the gut, the liver is also considered the seat of digestion — which means that both have to be working correctly in order for the food to be digested. The liver has to intelligently break the food down and send it on its way. But when it’s hot and angry, it oxidizes the food, which means it turns it into a hot reactive poison right away, instead of digesting it correctly, and this adds to the load of the other acid toxins coming through the skin.
So it’s bad enough that the children never got to get rid of the toxins they received from their mothers. Then they are given too many drugs at such an early age. Combined this with a highly processed diet. But now, even the good food gets turned into acid toxins as the two seats of digestion, the friendly bacteria in the gut and the liver, are now malfunctioning, turning all the food into an acid poison. No wonder the skin is dumping such an overload of toxins, which we call eczema and think that a cortisone cream will do the trick.
So the best way to treat it is like this: First, we have to fix both the friendly bacteria in the gut and cool down the liver. Then we have to stop the reactivity of the toxins coming through the skin. Then we have to direct the toxins away from the skin and into the urine.
We also have to change their diet so they stop taking in more toxins.
And there is one more thing Vaidya Mishra taught me, which is an amazing fact. As we were seeing all the skin conditions coming in every day, he would tell me that what you are looking at when you see all these problems with the skin, whether it’s eczema or psoriasis or any skin condition — you are in fact looking at toxins that were in the bone marrow, coming through the skin.
You might wonder how toxins get into the bone marrow, as it is hidden deep inside the structure of our hard bones. It turns out that the modern chemicals, such as pharmaceuticals, air pollution and pesticides go straight to the bone marrow, which accounts for the epidemic levels of skin conditions we are treating nowadays in both our children and adults.
So we also have to clean the bone marrow — very slowly and carefully so as not to aggravate the skin condition — which can sometime happen if you go too fast — because as the toxins come out of the bone marrow they are dumped onto the skin and it could actually aggravate any preexisting skin condition. But Vaidya Mishra taught me how to be careful and so our patients usually do quite well and don’t suffer this side effect of cleansing.
We also have to change their diets to a more wholesome one with less added chemicals.
And he of course made herbal lotions to put on the skin and medicated oils with antihistamine herbs and turmeric to stop the itching and reactivity of the skin.
He told me that the reason cortisone creams work so well is that they actually stop the detox process, so the skin stops dumping the toxins, which makes the symptoms go away. But they sometimes can return full force once the steroid is stopped, or even worse — if you push the toxins back in they will just continue to accumulate in the liver and bone marrow and other tissues, creating a more serious autoimmune disease or cancer in the long run.
This is why he would tell people how lucky they were when he was evaluating their skin condition. He would always say — “See how the toxins are damaging your skin on their way out — you’re lucky they are coming out — just think if they traveled to your brain and caused Alzheimer’s or stayed in the liver and caused liver cancer or remained stuck in the bone marrow causing a serious autoimmune disease.”
So now you see there is hope for you or your child’s eczema, an approach that is more holistic, that is non-toxic with no side effects, using only herbs, spices and food for healing. And gets to the root of the problem.
I hope you found this video useful. Thank you.
Thank you for listening.