(Apparently I’m trying to post too many words, so I’ll post in two parts).
This is quite a lengthy narrative so please bear with me. I have recently satisfied myself, more or less 95 percent, that sugar is the cause of my Psoriasis. I have had Psoriasis for over fifty years. On my forearms and elbows, nothing much has ever changed in all those years. If anything, it has gradually got worse, but in so slow a way as to be almost unnoticeable. Fifty years ago, I may have had a seven inch by three inch patch on both arms and, in later years, an eight by four. That was how much it had changed in fifty years. Psoriasis had never disappeared and returned to my forearms. It was ever present. On my lower legs, Psoriasis used to come and go, and to move around, to get worse or better. It followed no regular pattern, except that, it never disappeared completely from my lower legs. I also had some scalp psoriasis, but luckily it was above the hairline, so not seen. About thirty years ago, I was blessed with an additional problem. I started to suffer from spots on my face. These spots were sometimes a bit like teenage acne with yellow heads, and sometimes like small water blisters with colourless heads. The spots used to come and go but never disappeared completely, and sometimes they were quite unsightly. My local GP, at that time, said it was Rosacea, and when a doctor tells you that, you naturally have no reason to think otherwise. The treatment I was given for that was Metronidazole, which is a cream, commonly used for the treatment of Rosacea. This Metronidazole usually made things worse instead of better, in fact, this was even mentioned in the list of reported side effects. I know it’s crazy, but it’s true. After a year or two of this Rosacea, I began to notice a kind of pattern. Not initially with sugar, but with alcohol. I used to enjoy a social drink, either with my wife or with friends, and sometimes we used to go real boozing on beer and lager and cocktails. About two days after a session like this, I noticed that my Rosacea always flared up, and it would take a few days to calm down again, and also my Psoriasis would itch terribly. In those days, I was a working man, (I’m a retired electrician). You can imagine how I felt. I wasn’t prepared to give up social drinking after working all week, and so life carried on much as before. I assumed that the trouble was alcohol and I put up with it. About five years ago, I started to think that maybe sugar, and not alcohol, had something to do with my Rosacea. I started to research sugar in a small way. That was also the time when I joined this forum. Around December of 2006, I posted a few threads on PHO forums about different nationalities around the world and the possible connection between Psoriasis and sugar. Now what I really wanted to do was get rid of my Rosacea because it was on my face (I had more or less given up on my Psoriasis). I suppose there are Rosacea forums but I never looked for one, and I posted on the PHO forums. More recently, I began to wonder if I had Rosacea at all. I began to wonder if my Rosacea was in fact, not separate from my Psoriasis, but connected to it. Maybe I didn’t have Rosacea at all. Maybe I had Psoriasis with additional spots. About six months ago, I had a particularly bad bout of so called Rosacea, and I made a decision to give up all cakes and biscuits and sugary drinks, including beers and lagers. You know, everything which contained obvious amounts of sugar. My Rosacea died down a little but was still present. A couple of weeks after this, I started to eat a lot more fruit, hoping that this would help. I was eating bananas and peaches and dried apricots, all sorts of fruits. Instead of getting better, I got worse. Of course, I had one advantage, I knew that the difference between cause and effect was only about two days at the most, so therefore I could see quite quickly the results of aggravating my Rosacea. Now this is not a thing that you can usually do with Psoriasis proper. I can’t see any sudden changes in my Psoriasis because, for me, it is such a slow moving and puzzling disease.
