How To Treat Psoriasis

I am going to talk to you about how to manage psoriasis. Psoriasis is recognizable by lesions, that is abnormal condition that appears on the skin and the typical lesion of psoriasis is a heap of dry, scaly skin surrounded by redness or inflammation. Now, how do we tackle the problem? First of all, there are applications that can be helpful, to apply to these, these plaques, and the idea is to try to sort of thin them down and de-scale them and there are various medications that, for many years and traditionally, have been used in ointments, creams or lotions and these include a product called dithranol and coal tar.

Some of these ointments, which I say, are stringent, will call a burning on the skin and you will be told about this by your doctor and he might then prescribe what we call a steroid treatment, a mild steroid cream, to apply after using the more aggravating and attacking cream. Another new, newish range of drugs called biologicals, and there are various categories of these, but these, again, have been found very useful in patients who have stubborn psoriasis which is not responding to the topical treatments. It's also worth saying that in sunlight, ultraviolet light can be very useful in sufferers and, to give one example of that, in the Dead Sea in Israel, it's a low-lying expanse of water with a lot of salt in it, so you float, you can't swim in it.

But the spectrum of the ultraviolet light around the Dead Sea has lead to clinics or open air clinics being there, where patients will go and they will strip off and they will soak in these ultraviolet rays and this is helpful to the psoriasis, although they would, in addition, probably need to continue with their creams and applications. That is how psoriasis should be managed.
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