Monday, December 8, 2008

Which Psoriasis Treatments Work? (Psoriasis Treatment)

Psoriasis Treatment
When you suffer from psoriasis, you're constantly looking for psoriasis treatment that will actually work. And unfortunately this can be a long process of trial and error. You see, different people suffer from different degrees of psoriasis. There are even different types of psoriasis, and many people don't know this. Everyone responds differently to each treatment too, so sometimes a psoriasis treatment will work well for one person, yet not seem to make any difference for another.

Both children and adults can get psoriasis, but it seems to affect adults more often than not. Approximately 4.5 million people in the United States suffer from the disease.

With psoriasis, when the body's immune system over reacts to something, it starts producing new skin cells at drastically accelerated rates. Instead of those new skin cells taking a month to reach the surface of your body, they rise in just three to five days. Since this is not enough time for the existing skin cells to die off and start shedding, the skin piles up in the form of thick, scaley, flaky skin patches which are often red and itchy.

The thick flaky skin patches are seen in about 80% of psoriasis cases, but there are other forms of the condition too. Sometimes red blister like bumps will develop instead, and sometimes psoriasis looks like a skin rash. Because of these differences, and because psoriasis looks very similar to other skin conditions such as eczema, psoriasis is sometimes not easy to diagnose.

Most people try to treat psoriasis using standard dry skin creams, lotions and ointments. Once they know they have psoriasis though, they have other treatment options open. There are prescription psoriasis treatment which can be applied topically, and these often help reduce the thickness of the psoriasis plaques as well as reduce redness and itching.

Not everyone responds well to the topical psoriasis treatment though, and in those cases the doctor may use UV light therapy in addition to those topical treatments. UV light helps kill the surface skin cells more quickly. As the plaques are thinned, creams and ointments are able to penetrate the skin better.

When UV light therapy doesn't work, or the case of psoriasis is quite severe, another treatment is to use immune suppressing drugs which are administered via IV or injection at the hospital or doctor's office. These psoriasis treatment are for the worst cases only, because they can have dangerous side effects of their own.
Psoriasis Treatment

No comments:

Post a Comment