Customized Diet Did the Trick
from Arie

I've just come across your site. I wanted to let people know that as far as I'm concerned, it is our diets and general living habits that give us these diseases and conditions that seem to be incurable.

I got psoriasis when I was about  30 years old, it might have been dormant earlier, but who knows.  It began on my elbows and knees and slowly spread in spots all over the place. When it finally got to my face, I decided to see it I could do something about it. My life had some stresses, which didn't help, but after seeing doctors, Chinese doctors etc., and Dr. Tirant, I looked at all the info I had and put it together and decided I would, with the major help of my wife, create a diet made from all the suggestions from the doctors and the liver cleansing diet, and after a strict diet, lots of water, deep breathing nightly, and seven months, it is completely GONE.

This probably sounds like crap, but it is the truth and I have lots of witnesses, even though I have since become lazy and it has returned, not quite to the full extent that I had it, but it took a long time to return.  I am almost 40.  I have decided it is time to return and take control of my life.  I'm sorry I didn't take before and after photo's but I will this time. Please understand, I am not a major sufferer, as I have seen much, much worse cases than myself, but I still believe with a change of diet, lots of water and a little relaxation, you can get relief, if not get rid of it completely.

I did use creams a long my way to relieve the itching and pain, and by chance I lost 10 kg without even trying to lose weight at all. If anyone out there is interested in what  my diet actually was, I would be happy to let you know, as soon as I ask my wife  what we did exactly. Ed has my e-mail.  I may publish it anyway as soon as I start it again, in a few weeks. I have some other issues to contend with first, but as soon as they are out of the way, it's get rid of that flaked-out-feeling again.

Cheers,  -Arie

*****

Ed’s Response:  Do let us all know, Arie, more details about the diet that cleared you.  The “EDitorial attitude” here at FlakeHQ is that too many people have too much success using radical diets for us to consider diet in general a “crazy approach” to treating P. 

Perhaps the single biggest reason more people don’t try the diets popularly available (e.g., Pagano, Connolly) is that they require life-changing discipline to follow.  Eating habits are among the most entrenched in our culture and it makes complete sense to me that a great many of our ailments relate to what we eat.  Conversely, it makes sense to me that changing what we eat might affect those ailments.  Since I’ve not seriously undertaken a dietary regimen to palliate P, I’m in no position personally to point to any diet and say it does or doesn’t work.

I do acknowledge another downside to the dietary approach, which has to do with understanding what about diet effects P and why.  Fact is, nothing has been demonstrated scientifically.  We know that P’s manifestations vary widely from individual to individual.  If the way we respond to more conventional treatments is any indication, P has more varieties — more ways of being peculiar — than we have named.  (E.g.: Why did Enbrel do nothing for me but has surfaced as a brilliant new palliative for so many others?)  Accepting this variegated, multifaceted characteristic of P, it becomes intuitively understandable why the diets that have become most popular are also the most radical.  The changes in eating habits they call for are so sweeping, so metabolistically traumatic, that they may be having hundreds of effects on our biological systems while only one or a handful of these effects actually bring about the P improvement.

I yearn for one or both of these things to happen: 

(1)  Research on diet and P isolates some direct correlations (cause and effect relationships) between things consumed and flaking.  (We got excited about this when the ‘no pork’ rule in the Connolly diet got the limelight.  But ‘pork’ ended up being only one of many ‘don’ts’ in that regimen.)  Even if this is on the molecular level and not about specific foods (e.g., anything with X% animal fat content ... or ... any more than X% animal fat content in your daily food intake....) it could point to simplified, less traumatic diets with a high probability of improving P.

(2) A diet is proposed that both works and is easy to accomplish — even if the mechanisms that make it work aren’t understood.

Perhaps what you have to share with us, Arie, will fall into category (2)?  -Ed

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