Your Stories - Vitamin Supplements

Vitamin Supplements - Jo, London, UK

Well I guess I have a very similar story to many of the other people on this website! A story of being itchy, 'scabby' - my nickname at infant school and flaky. I spent my whole life being prescribed stronger and stronger steroid creams - which have resulted in thin skin and stretch marks all over my legs - great! My only break through was being put on a milk free diet as a child but as I also have itchyiosis (or however you spell it) as well as eczema, when I reached puberty (which is normally when most child eczema stops) my problems didn't go away.

As an adult I have tried the following:

Chinese Herbs - expensive, taste horrible, think they work for a bit and then don't. Absolute waste of money unless you are loaded or perhaps if you have an extremely good herbalist but I am skeptical.

Acupuncture - pretty much as above.

Skin Specialist - What on earth do they teach doctors in this country?? Lovely strong steroids and lard like creams which ruin your clothes and smell bad are apparently the only answer!! I was told by one doctor quite recently that there was nothing you could do to help eczema internally (ie diet etc), all you could do was treat the symptoms - ie more lard and steroids!!

Neem Oil - Finally a bit of a break through. This seemed to improve the overall texture/flakiness of my skin but didn't seem to rid me of irritation and sore patches and after a couple of years seemed to have little effect. Also it smells pretty bad so was a bit antisocial and my boyfriend found it a bit of a turn off!

Oh I have tried lots of things and in desperation I went to a private skin specialist last year. After analysing some tests he asked me to do on the NHS he told me to take Mega EPA 1000 fish oil, Vitamin C 500 and Zinc Ascorbate from a company called Bio Care. Wow within about 3 days the dry scaly skin started to improve. Nothing has ever been this good. My skin still gets itchy and irritated but now my skin isn't scaly all over, it doesn't look so bad so I am happier and probably less stressed. My clothes don't get ruined and my skin isn't so prone to infection.

Now we all know about people with eczema having a zinc deficiency and I have tried zinc supplements before but my doctor explained that some people can't ingest zinc properly without Vit C. I have also tried various fish oils previously but none seemed to make any difference. Somehow this combination from this particular company has done me the world of good.

My skin still gets itchy even though the texture has improved so I am keen to try Gammaderm that I have read about on this website.

In the meantime, would definitely recommend the bio care supplements to improve skin texture!!! (September 2006) Contact Jo

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Page updated: 12 September 2006