The Daily HIT

A new study, published online in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, finds that people who had eczema as children are more likely to develop asthma later on. The authors conclude, based on this association, that more aggressive (that is, pharmaceutical) treatment of eczema in children will lead to a decrease in the number of people who go on to develop asthma. I suspect that if they follow through on this recommendation, they will find the results disappointing.

Here’s a different lens through which one might interpret the eczema-asthma results, based on natural health theory. Let me stipulate at the outset that this has not been scientifically tested and therefore should considered a hypothesis worthy of consideration rather than a statement of fact.

This is the hypothesis, proposed by various natural healing proponents over the past couple of centuries:

           When one suppresses a symptom, it goes deeper.

If this is true, then treating the skin disease eczema with suppressive drugs such as topical steroids would drive it inward, causing it to manifest as a deeper-seated symptom, allergies. As this occurred, the skin eruptions might diminish or even disappear.

Following this line of reasoning one step further, if the allergies were subsequently treated with suppressive drugs such as antihistamines, they would likely go deeper still, manifesting as asthma.

This theory is more than a purely academic exercise for me, since it perfectly describes the eczema-allergy-asthma trajectory of illness and treatment with medication that I experienced in childhood. I have since learned that this pattern is not at all unusual.

Based on this “suppression drives illness deeper” hypothesis, one would predict that if the doctors who performed the study mentioned above influence enough of their colleagues to treat large numbers of eczema cases more aggressively, future studies will not only fail to find a smaller number of asthma cases, but will actually find a significantly larger number of asthma cases. Of course, we won’t know until years from now which hypothesis proves the more accurate predictor of future asthma rates.

The question on the table is whether employing suppressive medications is the best approach to treating irritating symptoms that are not dangerous. Asthma can be life-threatening. No responsible practitioner of any kind would advise withdrawing medications from someone with acute asthma.

But what about eczema? It’s a challenging question, because the symptoms of eczema are bothersome but not dangerous. This is also true of most cases of allergy.

Should suppressive medication be used before determining whether a non-suppressive approach might be fruitful? For example, might a newly introduced food in the young child’s diet be the factor that triggered the eczema? Or could there be there an environmental influence, a topical irritant like a particular soap or fabric?

These questions are worth exploring before launching into a new and more aggressive policy of increased medication.