Acne and Treatment – 1. Fact and Fallacy
| If you use over-the-counter or even prescription drugs for your acne problem then you have but a slim chance of success. This is the first of a series of three posts which examine a few alternative remedies that can put you well on the way to becoming free from this disfiguring complaint. |
This is the first in a series of three short postings on acne and the treatment that is available to deal with it. The intention of these postings is to sort the facts from the fallacies.
Our drugstores and shopping malls are crowded with acne cures of all kinds. The eBay Health and Beauty section is crowded with them. No wonder young people afflicted with acne don’t know which treatment is most likely to suit them.
Because everyone’s skin is different and the causes of acne are many and various there are some treatments that will probably make your condition worse rather than better. The problem is in trying to find out which ones those are, and avoiding them. However, on the positive side, there is almost certainly a combination that will help YOU, and this posting is about giving yourself the best chance of discovering it.
What we are going to cover in this posting and the following two in the series are the causes of acne, the over-the-counter treatments, herbal remedies and a couple of “hands on” techniques that have been shown to work well in many cases. The important things to establish, first of all, are the type of skin you have, and the likely cause of your problem.
It’s a popular fallacy that chocolate and other sugary foods cause acne, but in fact they don’t. The main culprit is an excess of a certain protein called keratin that is produced by the skin cells to prevent your skin drying up. Anything from stress to prolonged exposure to the sun to seasonal changes can set this off.
The resulting gunk then blocks the oil ducts within your hair follicles and stops the oil escaping onto your skin surface (thereby tending to dry out the skin, leading to the anomaly of greasy spots on dry skin). Add the bacteria naturally present in your hair follicles, and the resultant waste material becomes trapped just beneath your skin surface, leading to spots, blackheads, and so on.
If you can find a way of preventing this blockage, or, even better, preventing excess keratin from forming in the first place, then you will have your acne problem done and dusted. Can you do that with commonly available remedies? More on that in the next posting.
Philip Gegan
You can find out how to deal with your acne problem for good and all by knowing which points on your body to press for just 60 seconds at a time. More details are at our Home Page.
May 26th, 2010 at 11:56 am
[...] the previous posting in this series on acne and the treatment available for it we looked at some of the treatments available to combat your [...]