20 year case of Eczema cured with St. John's Wort

Hi Sandra and welcome to this discussion!

I am sorry to hear you appear to be experiencing an outburst of eczema... I had to deal with the same situation so many times in the past and completely understand how frustrating it can be when you thought you had discovered the culprit in your life, only to return to square one.

Since I last posted over here, I have been active on several other forums worldwide, and have helped a few people relieve or eliminate their eczema by suggesting them to try St. John's Wort. In all successful cases, it did take a little time to see improvements, but once they were there, they became quite spectacular. In one particular case, a woman with her own blog on eczema, documented with photographs the disappearance of her plaques within 2 weeks of starting a 600mg/ day oral course of St. John's Wort. After 2 months, she now declares herself almost entirely cured, suffering only from mild skin dryness, which she alleviates with ordinary moisturising cream. But the itching and the plaques are gone and she is literally in complete disbelief. To add to her state of surprise, she no longer needs to take medication for asthma, a condition she obviously did not expect to improve by taking St. John's wort. I am extremely happy to have made such a difference in her life and hope many others will benefit from St. John's wort potential curative powers.

If you do elect to try it out, please do read about all the potential side effects and interactions that St. John's wort may create, but otherwise, I wish you as much success as I had with this wonderful plant!

Reading with interest - would you be able to describe how you use the St. John's worth? And also - what kind of interactions are you thinking of? 

 

Hi Hanny... glad to see you are still active on the forum and hope you have had success in dealing with your condition since we last wrote to each other over here.

I take the dry extract in pill form, certified to contain 0.3% Hypericin. It's a German pharmaceutical extraction process called LI 160, the most common for St. John's wort pills worldwide. But many other people who cannot tolerate St. John's wort orally have been successful in treating various skin conditions by applying its oil locally, which you can find in many herbal remedies shops across the world.

St John's Wort is extremely bioactive medication, which means that it can either increase or decrease the potency of certain medications when taken concurrently. For instance, it can decrease the potency of the birth control pill, thereby rendering it useless and causing undesired pregnancies. But the list of potential interactions is long, so it is best to seek professional medical advice or consulting serious scientific sites to get all the info. Remember that interactions and side-effects don't always affect everyone. They are only warnings and possibilities to make people aware of the risks.

Cheers!

Hi Gregg,

Thankyou for the useful imformation I will research St. John's wort and possibly give it a go. I will also look into the oil.

Thanks Greg.  I totally see that good professional medical guidance is needed with this one.  

If you are taking medication that is on the interaction list, or if you are suffering from complex health issues, yes. But otherwise, St. John's Wort Is considered quite safe as long as you don't exceed typical recommended doses and is pretty much side-effect free for most... Also consider that is has been in use for over 2,000 years. I was reading recently that during the middle ages, it was the "medication of choice" to treat battle wounds!

Greg, I do have multiple health issues and have learned to be extremely careful.  I always consult with my nature path.  I'm not a scientist or have any medical training.  I need to communicate with those who are in the know. But that said, I do make suggestions while communicating with them and ask questions. So it is good to know that St John's Wort has a possible possitive affect on skin disease.  Thanks!

A pleasure and I completely agree with your strategy. Fear about any medication is a very good thing when you consider that each person is unique and reacts differently to its intake. I simply wanted to reassure those like myself who are not taking any other medication and are not dealing with multiple diseases that this plant will usually do far more good than harm in the body. I literally consider it as the best medicine I have ever taken in my whole life, but for someone else, it might be a completely different story.

Hej Greg

Thank you for sharing your experience with St. John's Wort - it sounds very interesting. My girlfriend has been suffering with LSC for nearly a decade now. Every time she sees a doctor or dermatologist, she just gets a presciption for various hormone creams, and are told to just stop scratching - very frustrating! The LSC keeps spreading and are know all over her feet, legs, arms and stomach. 

We are looking into the possibility of trying alternative medication, but since herbal medication is hugely ignored/rejected by physicians in Denmark, I would like to do some research on my own.

Could you share a link (or words to plug into a search machine) to the blog you're mentioning above? And have you heard of other people, who have cured their eczema using St. John's Wort, after you started posting about your own experience? 

Best regards

Ben

Hi Ben,

I understand exactly what your girlfriend has been going through, since I was told exactly the same thing from my own dermatologists (to stop scratching and to try managing my stress levels). I cannot blame them, because that is what science understood of the disease back then, and thanks to the University of Michigan scientists who uncovered the role of the Delta Toxin in infected skin, we now know that the scratching is very legitimate and has very little to do with stress.

I will private-message you to give you the link of the blog I was mentioning. The blog is in French, since the lady who details her success story with St John's Wort is in France; so if you cannot understand what she is writing, you will at least be able to see the pictures of her wounds healing by scrolling down the page.

Enjoy and best of luck for your girlfriend!

I've had skin itching for around 15 years and I have to take anti histamines, but St John's Wort essential oil (I discovered recently) rubbed into the souls of my feet really helps!

I'd like to know more about this Greg because I've had the terrible skin itching for years and I'm not happy about relying on antihistamines. Please message me about it.

Will do and send you the links in a few minutes.

Cheers.

To see a specialist as a first step is probably your best bet at the time. A specialist might also be able to confirm without doubt that you are indeed experiencing a stronger and unusual outburst of eczema, and not suffering from something else. What I mean by that, is that the eczema could just be a symptom of some other ailment.

As far as cortisone-based creams are concerned, I have to agree with you, because of my personal experience, that they are not very useful and only act as a "band-aid" without going to the root-cause of the disease. In my case, there is very little doubt in my mind that this root-cause was a bacterial infection on damaged skin layers. St. John's wort must have helped in dealing with this infection, neutralised the inflammation and helped in repairing the damaged skin. This is the only plausible explanation, since 20 years of various therapies, both natural and conventional, did practically nothing to relieve my eczema. I still have no trace of the disease, now 2 years after starting a treatment course with St. John's wort.

If and when you do see a specialist, try to find out if he can make skin tests for Staphylococcus Aureus or other similar hard-to-beat strains of bacteria. Your specialist, if from the field of conventional medicine, will unfortunately not be in a position to recommend St. John's Wort as a treatment, because this medicine still belongs to the highly experimental field of alternative and complementary therapies. He will, however, be able to tell you if you can try it out with relative safety, having your health profile on hand.

I wish you the best of luck!

 

Hi Gregg,

Thankyou for your reply, I am going to make an appointment with a different doctor tomorrow and ask for a referral. Can I ask are you still taking the St . Johns wort or did you stop when the excema was gone?

That sounds like great news!

Yes, I kept on taking SJW. Not because of any fear the eczema might return (which is always possible - I can't possibly know in advance), but because I discovered how much SJW helped with my mood during the tough Canadian winter season. Everyone in northern countries has at some point experienced the "Winter Blues"... All my life, I just had never realised how much that tough weather and abscence of light affected my emotions, until I noticed how much better I felt when taking SJW. So I guess I almost consider SJW as my personal "multi-purpose vitamin" after having discovered such great healing virtues!

Sounds great to me and no side effects for you either! I'll be in touch in the future and let you know how I faired with it all, Thankyou for all your advice.

 

That is correct, no side-effects so far... Very little is known about the long-term use of SJW and its effects on human health, but I hope research will eventually prove that a SJW pill a day is as least as good as an apple and also keeps the doctor away!

Will be looking forward to hear about your progress! All the best!

 

I haven't drunk coffee or tea for around 8 years; I've been drinking St John's Wort tea instead for that long and it hasn't done me any harm, only good! 

No it's 10 years I've been drinking it for thinking about it and I intend to keep on drinking it every day.