Roseacea is defined as a skin rash whose cause is unknown. It is said that the small vessels in the face dilate creating reddening, irritation, sometimes acne, grease on the face, sometimes enlarged skin pores and even enlarging of the nose.
It’s recommended that you should avoid anything hot to prevent more heating of the skin, such as hot spices, alcohol, sunlight, stress, fragrances and heat in general.
While these recommendations are correct, what really needs to be done is to dig deeper into the underlying causes. With every patient I see, I tell them that it’s like putting pieces of a puzzle together in order to first identify all the underlying causes. And once we find these underlying causes, which are different in each person, then we can begin building a treatment plan which includes specific targeted herbs, dietary changes and detoxification procedures.
It’s always difficult to describe how we treat any health problem, because the real truth is that there is no protocol to treat anything. So with any disease, such as roseacea and any others you can think of, there is no protocol for treatment because the underlying causes are different in each person and each person is unique in what herbs they can and cannot handle, the diet for each person is different, and each person will walk away with a totally different detox protocol than the next patient.
So, as hard as it is to do, I will attempt to give a general rundown of the way we treat it. I always tell the patients that we have to start at the superficial level and keep working our way backwards until we eventually reach all of the deep underlying causes.
By now, if you’ve been listening to any of my videos or classes on my website, you know that anything on the skin is showing you the health of the body on the inside. The skin is the largest organ in the body, doing just what it was designed to do all day every day — and that is to dump toxins out onto the skin. But you don’t usually see or feel the toxins as they come through.
When you start to see redness, itching, acne and other issues on the skin, this lets you know that the toxins coming through are very hot and burning and hurt the skin as they come through. So now let’s begin asking pertinent questions and working our way backwards.
Why would the toxins be hot? Well, because the blood which is holding these toxins is hot. Why would the blood be hot? Because the liver, which makes the blood from the food you eat, is hot from too many toxins being held in it. We call these hot toxins coming through the skin ama visha and gar visha.
Ama visha forms in the gut if either something is wrong with your digestion and/or the food is too heavy and it tends to remain stuck in the bowel instead of absorbing into the bloodstream. Once this residue (known as ama) of partially digested food gets stuck it rots and ferments and forms ama visha. The word visha means poison, so now this channel-clogging and cold ama has now become very hot, inflammatory and acidic. When this type of toxin comes through the skin, it forms all kinds of skin conditions, such as roseacea. So the first step in treating roseacea is to identify and treat all the weaknesses in digestion, which includes the gut microbiome, the liver, and gall bladder, to help prevent the formation of ama visha.
The second type of hot toxin is known as gar visha. These are toxins made outside the body, such as pharmaceuticals, skin care products, air pollution, pesticides, perfumes, fragrances and the toxins found in processed foods. So in these cases we have to see all the mistakes the person is making with these types of chemicals, and try to reduce them to as few as possible. Then cleansing has to be done to take them out of the body.
The skin is also showing you the health of the liver. Any toxin you take into the body, whether orally, through the skin, or breathing it in finds its way into the liver. Most modern toxins nowadays are very hot in nature, which is why we have global warming as the whole earth is heating up from the air pollution and industry. On a smaller scale our liver is heating up from the nonstop chemical toxins going through it on a daily basis. If the liver gets hot, the liver makes the blood, then the blood gets hot, which heats up the toxins sitting in the blood, as I mentioned before.
So with most cases of roseacea we have to be careful how we give the herbs and give them in a way which won’t heat the liver, which means we will have to give many of the herbs either transdermally through the skin or through herbal nectar drops which are put in water which retain the intelligence of the herb, without having to give the crude herb in a tablet or tea form, which will flare up the heat in the liver and the blood and thus flare up the roseacea.
We also have to take our patients off most of the nutraceuticals they take as these highly processed and synthetic versions of the vitamins also create quite a bit of heat and toxicity in the liver. And many times we have to take the patient off herbs they are taking as they unwittingly are swallowing lots of herbal tablets, tinctures and teas in their efforts to get well, but are actually heating the liver even more, stoking the flame for the skin condition.
We all know by now that we’ve surrounded ourselves with about 80,000 chemicals in the food, air, water, on the skin and in the pharmaceuticals. Most chemicals get stored in our body in our fat cells. The sweat is the detox pathway of the fat cells. Therefore we have to use a wide variety of herbs to detox both the fat cells and the sweat.
And to make matters even more complicated, whenever you look at any skin problem you are looking at toxins that were stuck in your bone marrow. So this means that we must clean the bone marrow, but you have to be very artful in your approach to doing this because the skin can flare up even more when you begin pulling toxins out of the bone marrow. This is because when you pull toxins from any of the deep tissues, such as the bone marrow, they will come out through channels into the bowel movement, urine and the sweat. You might not see them in the bowel movement and urine, but you can definitely see them coming through the skin, especially when they’re so hot and reactive. Which means that your wonderful detox of the bone marrow will now flare up your skin condition.
So you have to do very slow detox over the long haul rather than attempting to pull the toxins out very quickly. And during the cleanses you have to lubricate the physical channels as they come through, so they won’t rupture the channels on their way out.
And you have to do all this cleansing of the liver, the blood, the sweat, the fat cells, and the bone marrow while at the same time keeping the liver cool.
Fortunately, my teacher and mentor, Dr. RK Mishra who I interned with for 20 years, taught me all the details of how to do this correctly. It took me many years to learn, but his 5,000 year old family lineage of Ayurveda, known as Shaka Vansya Ayurveda, or SVA, were all dermatologists. So thanks to Vaidya Mishra I was able to learn the correct way to treat these very difficult skin conditions, taking all the precautions every step of the way, and guiding each patient down their own unique path as they recover.
He made various skin creams, skin clays, probiotic creams, and clays for the liver and many types of abhyanga oils for daily oil massages. And each patient gets their own unique tea recipe using remedies to direct the toxins away from the skin and into the urine, remedies to calm down the reactivity of the toxins as they come through the skin, remedies to clean the fat cells, purify the sweat and cool the heat in the liver.
There are many other avenues we could take depending on what’s needed in each patient, but in this video I hope to give you a general idea of the correct way to treat roseacea, rather than just giving antibiotics (which will make this problem worse in the long run as the antibiotics destroy more of the gut micro biome and heat the liver even more).
I hope you can see the very deep way we address not only roseacea, but all skin conditions. This is a truly inspired way of tackling the problems from the source, as opposed to giving each patient the same treatment designed only to keep the skin cool and free of infection.