Saturday, December 28, 2013

Psoriasis and Seawater

There's no cure for psoriasis, but it's well known that bathing in seawater is an effective treatment for psoriasis especially when combined with sunshine. I have mild psoriasis on my shins. Most of the time it doesn't bother me but sometimes it keeps me awake at night. Before I knew what it was I tried applying all sorts of things to my shins to make it go away -- anti fungal creams, aloe vera and various oils. Nothing worked. I started eating 4 tablespoons of raw sunflower seeds a day to get my vitamin E requirements naturally and noticed improvement in my overall skin health and it seemed to help the psoriasis. When I went to Hawaii for vacation it completely disappeared. At the time I didn't know my skin problem was psoriasis and I thought that I had finally conquered it with more that a year of eating sunflower seeds. A couple of months after I got back from Hawaii my skin problem starting coming back. I later figured out that my it was psoriasis and that it was all the time snorkeling in the ocean and time in the sun that made it go away. Now, whenever my psoriasis starts to bother me I go for a short stroll in the Puget Sound. I have found that being in the water for only a minute is effective. That's me in the picture standing shin deep in the Puget Sound. Yes it is cold.

Everything I have read about seawater and psoriasis suggests that seawater's effectiveness relates to it's mineral content. That may be partly true, but if that's all there was too it, it seems it would be easy to make a cream that is just as effective. I suspect the effectiveness relates more to other things in the water, like viruses, bacteria and archaea. One liter of seawater contains billions of viruses and microbes. A dip in the ocean will change your skin flora and perhaps that's what treats psoriasis.

What do you think?

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