"Eczema can often just clear up on it's own by age 7" - a simple sentence said by my Dr when I was younger that has shaped me in ways I never realised until now.
I was on one of my regular trips to the GP, I must have been 5/6 I guess. I took that sentence and clung to it, there was hope that this eczema nightmare would all end on my 7th birthday.
Why had no one told me this before, it would have been much easier to deal with the pain and itching if I knew there was an end date!
For a while I held this little light in my heart that on my 7th birthday I would wake up and there would be no more pain, no more flaking, no more unsightly sores or broken skin and I would be able to eat like my friends.
Of course you all know that this wasn't to be the case. I remember going to bed on my 6th birthday so hopeful only to be devastated the following day on waking and seeing my skin in the same condition, no worse, than when I had gone to bed the previous night.
That for me was the start of my belief that Dr's can't be trusted.
Now obviously at the point that my Dr uttered those words in the consultation when I was little I'm sure they were just trying to give some hope. Kids however do odd things with words, they take them and create their own interpretation and it's those interpretations that shape who they become as adults.
So now I'm growing up with the belief that Dr's can't be trusted, this then progressed to not trusting anyone who tried to suggest a cream to me, especially if they were linked to a pharmaceutical company because well they were just about selling, they didn't care about me and my skin!
When you have eczema trying a new cream is like Russian roulette with a flame thrower, at any moment that new cream might feel like you have just been set on fire (and if it's oil based good luck washing that off!)
It wasn't until recently that I realised I held this belief and figured out where it stemmed from, and honestly this realisation has helped me to move forward and better understand why I decided to become a Naturopath.
There is so much still to learn about the body, science has yet to prove so many things and I love that I can study different techniques to discover my own path. I see a future of collaboration between natural medicine and the NHS because let's face it the NHS can't cope with the high levels of chronic conditions we have in our society now.
I often wonder what the future will be like for treatment options for chronic long term conditions like eczema, I would love to see more collaboration and every time I see a Doctor embrace functional medicine, where they treat the whole person (not just the symptom), my belief installed in my age 7 dies a little bit. I hope this continues.