It’s no shocker nowadays to talk about diseases like cancer, heart disease, or diabetes—serious diseases that people have to deal with for life and are no picnic to treat. It’s wonderful that we’re able to bring these topics out into the open and make treatments for them widely available, improving the quality of life of the people who have them.
Yet there are still less serious but no less valid diseases that many people have that we sweep under the rug. At times we don’t accept them as real disorders, downplay the experience of having these disorders, or even shame the person because their condition alters them in ways we can’t understand.
And when we don’t talk about certain conditions, we worsen the impact they have on the people who have to live with these ailments, and negatively affects medical science because there’s less focus placed on finding improvements to them.
Psoriasis
Psoriasis is an autoimmune condition that causes skin cell production to speed up, causing immature skin cells to appear on the surface of the skin in the form of patches of silver scales.
The extent of psoriasis can range from small flakes to covering majority of your skin’s surface, most commonly showing up on the elbows, knees, and scalp. The patches can become red and inflamed, and can sometimes crack and bleed.
Episodes of psoriasis occurs in cycles: there’s a flare-up of symptoms for days up to weeks, then you go into a period of remission where there are no active symptoms, only to return when triggered by conditions such as stress, or other illness.
Psoriasis is not contagious; not even when you touch a psoriatic person’s lesions.
Prevalence: Psoriasis is the most prevalent autoimmune disease: 7.5 million Americans (or 2% of the American population) have been diagnosed with psoriasis.
What you can do: There is currently no cure for psoriasis. Treatment focuses on relieving pain and slowing the growth of skin cells to stop the scaling. Your doctor can give you topical treatments for your skin, medications to control the immune system, and UV light therapy.
As for living with psoriasis, it’s important to recognize and control your triggers. Stress is a common and preventable trigger. You can manage stress through breathing exercises, meditation, art or sports, and verbalizing to a support system.
Nail fungus
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