Dyshidrosis is the most poorly-understood condition I've ever heard of, never mind had to deal with. I'm not one of these anti-vax, paranoid, doctor-mistrusting conspiracy theorists, but when it comes to dyshidrosis, the medical community is still in the Dark Age and/or in denial, at least in the United States.
My first breakout was in 2015, it was worse than any subsequent breakouts I've had since, and it happened at the worst possible time -my grad school advisor dropped me because I couldn't type research papers, couldn't do my field work, etc. Yeah about the "itchy", imagine poison ivy times ten plus electric zaps, and that's just the first phase .... since not-scratching is basically impossible (when it's bad enough, you'll do it in your sleep, if you can sleep) then it inevitably scabs up, but not like normal scabbing; the whole area swells, thickens, and hardens with a brittle surface, so every little flex can cause it to split open and bleed all over the place. -Nowadays my breakouts are more proximal (the palm portion or maybe up to the first knuckle) but my early ones were distal, on my fingertips, and I mean all around them- top, bottom and sides. I couldn't so much as touch anything without agony, never mind grip things. There were periods when I had only one or two possible fingers to use on my phone, because the rest were too hard and crusty to register as 'human' for the touch screen.
Basically picture no longer being human, considering how much your hands set you apart from any animal. But then add to that constant, inescapable misery, even if you just sit with your hands in your lap.
I had no health insurance at the time. -Oh before I forget, this was long before I got into jewelry. Fish were more my thing then (also the subject of my research), but I'd been messing with them since childhood. But yeah of course my first assumption was some kind of allergy. Fairly quickly I learned this particular presentation, with the clusters of tiny blisters on fingers, was called dyshidrosis, but the "facts" about it on the internet .... were just all over the place. I tried every recommendation I found, spent a small fortune at Walgreens and Whole Foods, applying this, avoiding that, eating and not-eating all kinds of things, to no avail. Scariest and most depressing of all was when I found out this horrific thing could go on for YEARS, maybe the rest of my life, with no effective treatment. I found blogs and community forums of people sharing their stories, so much suffering with no end in sight.
Finally a few months into the nightmare I found publications by an Australian researcher and podiatrist (dyshidrosis affects some people on their feet, instead of, or in addition to, their hands). It's no exaggeration to say I may owe this woman my life. -Her findings were that the condition isn't an allergy at all, but a reaction to a harsh imbalance in the GUT FLORA, namely an overpopulation of Candida yeast in the small intestine. Crazy as that sounds, everything she said fit perfectly with ME -the way my breakouts tended to start during sleep and especially peri-menstruallly, and the fact that I had been on a low-carb diet for quite a while before my first breakout, but then began eating more carbs again immediately before the breakout -that was what caused the sudden Candida bloom.
She provided some recommendations of things to try 'on your own' (without doctors), like steady moderate carb consumption, vitamin A supplementation, and a few other things .... but she said the best, most direct CURE would be to take a drug called Nystatin -ORALLY, not topically, because the skin isn't where the actual problem is coming from. But here's the sad part: she said if you live in the United States, don't be surprised if you can't get a doctor to prescribe it. Sure enough, when I got a job with health insurance in 2016, I finally got to see a dermatologist, and NOPE she wouldn't prescribe me oral Nystatin, in fact she'd never heard of it used orally for anything, couldn't imagine why it would do any good for an "allergic contact eczema". She clearly had barely even heard of dyshidrosis, period. She did try to appease me by giving me Nystatin topical cream, plus some other cream that she thought would work better ... but neither did any good whatsoever.
So I went back to the Aussie's publications online, and saw that she encouraged anyone to write to her, to share their dyshidrosis experiences as contributions to her ongoing research. So I did, and she was a delight to converse with (she was even willing to talk on the phone one day, when my fingers were too painful to type). And here was the lifesaving part: she told me I could just order Nystatin powder from Canada with no prescription! Granted, it was pretty expensive and tastes horrible ... but oh my, SO worth it! Without fail, just a couple of small doses over a couple of days causes the outbreak to freeze in its' tracks, like magic.
-Those scabs you see in the photos I took yesterday; those are in the final phase and will only get better. But if I hadn't started a course of Nystatin on the first day of itching, there would have been more areas affected ..... and it would have gone on for weeks, if not months.
