Child’s Eczema Treatment: Myths, Facts, and Effective Relief Options

If your child suffers from eczema, you are probably desperate to find a way to provide him or her with relief. 90% of all cases of eczema, start before age 5, most occurring while the child is an infant and is more difficult to comfort. It can be very frustrating.

However, this does not mean that you cannot treat the condition and give your child the relief they deserve.

Myths Versus Facts

One of the most important steps to treating your child’s condition is to dispel the many myths out there about the condition. Everyone in your life is probably offering their opinion, based on hearsay knowledge, of how to treat the condition. Unfortunately, many of these myths can make the condition worse.

One of the biggest myths that you may have heard is that you should only bathe your child once a week. This could not be further from the truth because good hygiene is an important factor in controlling and limiting flare-ups. However, you should cut back on harsh soaps and use other emulsifying agents that will clean and soothe the skin. Ph-neutral and low-Ph soaps are recommended.

Medicated bath oils are also recommended. If your child is still in diapers, it is important that you clean the diaper area often because infants are often prone to eczema in this area as a result of the warm, damp skin combined with the germs from their soiled diaper. Along those lines, there is also a myth out there that you should avoid light to treat eczema. This is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

In fact, many doctors and natural healers use Ultra-Violet (UV) light to treat eczema in children with substantially positive results. You should seek advice from someone you trust on how to best use UV light to treat your child. Diet control is also often mistakenly thought to cause eczema outbreaks. In fact, there have been several studies, including those studying eczema in children, which addressed the issue of diet.

None have found any conclusive evidence that the diet caused an outbreak of eczema. Children need good nutrition for growth and healing, so do not eliminate nutritious food from their diet because it will not affect their condition.

Topical Treatments for Eczema

Another major myth out there that needs to be addressed is that the steroids in topical treatments will harm your child. Topical treatments, such as lotions with steroids, are the most common and most popular form of treatment. It is an antiquated belief that they harm the skin. Hydrocortisone is a very mild steroid that is gentle on the skin but very effective against childhood eczema.

As with any prescription, always make sure you follow the directions and dosing correctly. However, if your doctor has prescribed your son or daughter a topical treatment with hydrocortisone, you should not hesitate to use it. It is very likely your child will find relief from this type of ointment.

When using a topical treatment for eczema children, it is important that you remember this is a recurring condition. Do not expect to apply treatment and have your child’s condition go away forever. Instead, the treatment will ease your child’s symptoms, including discomfort and appearance. Over 75% of all eczema patients state that the ability to manage their symptoms in this way has improved their quality of life.

In the case of eczema treatment children are no different. Do not lose motivation when another outbreak occurs because your child is still better off managing the symptoms with a topical treatment than with none at all. As an alternative to topical creams and ointments, paste bandages have been very effective. These are wet bandages that are often zinc-based. Zinc has amazing skin-healing properties.

When applied wet it both immediately relieves discomfort and helps the skin inflammation to heal. This type of bandage is prescribed by your doctor and you should be hesitant to buy any over-the-counter variations. Also, your doctor or nurse should show you how to apply the bandages because they can cause further discomfort if they are applied too tightly or incorrectly.

Allergens

Another common misunderstanding about eczema, especially atopic eczema that occurs in children, is the relation to allergens. This is because most people use the word allergen in reference to any substance that makes their body have a reaction, especially reactions like sniffles, mild rashes, and itching.

However, a true allergen is one that causes your immune system to overreact. This overreaction typically causes the type of inflammation seen in atopic eczema. This type of overreaction is normally the result of a combination of allergens which is why removing a single allergen, such as a fabric softener or a wool sweater, does not typically treat the problem.

In fact, you may not have a reaction to two separate allergens but when they are combined they can cause the problem. This is also why traditional allergy testing often fails to identify the cause of eczema in children. Here is a good example of allergens working together to trigger a flare-up in your child. Dust mites are a common allergen that causes hives, asthma, and other types of reactions.

They are also considered a trigger for eczema when combined with other factors. However, a child can be around dust mites all day long and not get a reaction, but their condition may change as soon as they go to bed. At bedtime, your child is typically bundled up under covers and the raised heat makes their body more susceptible to a flare-up. The increased heat is combined with the lack of distraction, giving your child more opportunity to scratch at dust-mite-related irritations.

The result is that your child will wake up with an eczema reaction. Even though it is a single allergen, eliminating dust mites is an important step in treating child eczema. There are several things you must do to get rid of dust mites.

A quality vacuum is needed to achieve the suction needed to remove dust mites, along with pet dander and other allergens. Also, you should get bedding, in all of your bedrooms that is hypoallergenic and repels dust mites. Use a mattress cover and avoid feather pillows. Make sure you clean all bedding regularly.

If you have received a lot of hand-me-downs for your child, like bedding, mattresses, and other furniture you may either want to replace them with new, hypoallergenic materials or treat them with dust mite treatment sprays. Remember, dust mite treatment sprays are chemical in nature and can cause a skin irritation or eczema reaction themselves.

Finding Quality Advice

There are other quality treatments out there that are safe and natural, but there are also a lot of people offering bad advice. If you want to better understand treatment options for your child’s eczema, it is important that you find quality information that you can trust. This information should come from a dermatological expert offering information on both physical and psychological treatments for eczema. Ideally, this advice will address both medical and alternative treatments with an equally open mind.

The ebook Eczema Free offers you this kind of advice. It is written by a person who suffered from Eczema for several years. Eczema Free will give you the advice you need to safely and effectively treat and soothe your child’s eczema.

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