What is Execzema?

What is eczema? A path to ending the misery is non-fiction. It’s full of medical facts presented in a readable format.

What would drive me to delay a burgeoning career as a novelist to write a factual book on a topic of such abject misery? The number of parents who asked me why the doctors won’t explain eczema. These were parents of children with Atopic Eczema, an insidious skin condition delivering great unhappiness for the victims and their families.

I had suffered from bad eczema at university so I knew a lot about it. As my learning of disease processes developed I came to the realisation that the eczema was actually my skin reacting in a protective manner against products I was using to treat the eczema. The treatment was the cause. I was training to become a veterinary surgeon so being able to end a human condition had little relevance.

Decades later I was ending Chronic Hand Eczema for nurses and it dawned on me I was utilising the skills learned from my own experience. I had ended my eczema and the nurses seemed happy to have wonderful skin after years of eczema, all of which suggested I had something to offer.

I wrote the book as though it was a sequence of coaching sessions. The aim was to have the parents come to their own realisation that the products they were being advised to apply to their child’s red skin were the problem. It was important for it to be their realisation as that presented them with the choice of doing more of the same or opting to do something different. When they did the latter the skin could heal itself.

To reinforce their confidence I included a 5,000 word review of the medical literature as an appendix. The parents gained the added conviction of knowing they knew what the doctors had chosen to not tell them. In reality the doctors did not know what is in the book and now we are sharing the scientific logic with medical colleagues, including dermatologists.