Ok so here's my story, read through it all as every part aided in my healing and hopefully you'll learn something, this is for if your ec was caused by trauma to the lips, not if your ec is an internal problem, and before anybody asks Im not posting any before and after pictures for personal reasons so please don't bug me for them. Your choice whether you take any of what I say on board, I'm happy to take criticism or any questions but the main reason Im doing this is because I've gone through what most of you have gone through on this forum, maybe worse than some, so i want to help if i can, I know how depressing and frustrating it can get at times but remember that one day this will be over and you'll look back at it like a bad dream and think thank god I got through that.
I got EC about this time last year while working a stressful warehouse job in my gap year, ended up picking my top lip raw not realizing the damage i was doing while i was doing it, finished my job in January and realized that my lips were severely damaged so started to leave them alone wanting to heal them, the first 2 months or so i went through the dry healing stage obviously having never encountered anything like it (around the time i started following this forum) i thought that it was normal, my lips grew thick thick layers of (lets call them scabs) and they fell off regularly in the shower or they just came off naturally sometimes leaving the lips raw and bright red, they became really inflamed up to 2 times it normal size, visited many GPS and got the same advice, brush lips with toothbrush to remove dead skin and moisturize which looking back may have been slightly better advice than i gave them credit for but at the time i was hysterical about not damaging the scabs so i didn't take the advice on board at all,none of them recognized the signs of infection on my lips which i am now was 100% sure responsible for the inflammation, fast forward 4 months of dry healing and taking vitamin c and zinc supplements and moisturizing scabs with olive oil and aquaphor, my scabs had become alot smaller and my lips had improved slightly since the (injury) 6 months previous. key thing here is scabs had reduced but my lips themselves had barely healed, I'll come back to this a bit later. So I had to start university in september and this was june/july time so started getting hysterical again and basically forced a gp to prescribe me nystatin with hydrocortisine in it, this dramatically reduced the scabs and inflammation in the lips but again lip skin didn't heal very much. It was around this time that i read on this forum about the slathering on the aquaphor all day every day and it made sense to me with regards to moist wound healing so I started doing that and the most amazing thing happened, i broke out in a a really bad allergic reaction and i realised i was allergic to the lanoliin in aquaphor all along, this probably slowed down my healing time massively since i had been applying it since about the middle of my treatment so i cut that out instantly, i tried vaseline for a while but that was more drying than moisturising so purchased vaniply which was on the expensive side but quite worth it and I slathered that on in the same fashion that some others on this forum were doing using aquaphor, at this point my lips were not scabbing anymore as long as i always kept it moisturised (what stage most of the older users on this forum are at and managing it basically), if i put water on my lips and let it dry thin layers would start to form but obviously i never let it get that far. It was around this time that i realized what exactly the problem with my lip was and how i could heal it completely, you see i could clearly see which parts of my lip were damaged because not only was there a clear colour difference between the normal lip skin and the damaged lip (bottom half of top lip, and most of bottom lip) skin, but they were also the only places that got dry as soon as i applied water, so i knew that if i healed these damaged part of my lips then my ec would go away as they wouldnt get dry and scab anymore, I visited gps again but they had no solution except keep moisturising and wait it out but i knew this would take too long, so i bought products that were specifically targeted for epidermal repair and collagen synthesis which is exactly what i wanted to happen faster on the lips, after using these i could genuinely see the lip skin slowly forming slowly and from my lip injury to now i would say my lip damage has been reduced by 80% to the point you have to look closely to see the injury, once the skin fully heals i'll be done from ec ,so let me tell you what I've learnt and this is from my experience, lips was damaged and scabs form to heal the lip this is ec, scabs get infected from mouth being a high bacteria area and impairs healing (this is the main stage of ec i think), dry healing will work but will take years if that even if infection is removed, so thats definitely a nono. You must moisturize. But the best healing method by far is to either wash off scabs in shower or let them peel naturally to raw state, and then keep lips moisturized 24 hours a day so scabs do not form again and work on healing actual injury to lip skin, this has been working for me and im pretty sure it will for a lot of other people who's cause of ec was trauma to the lips, i.e picking, keep in mind that im not using terms like scab and injury for their literal scientific definition these are just what they felt like to me. so hear are the products I've been using for the last couple of weeks and have been working for me, all I found online after doing research on what helps heal wounds best:
Cicaplast pro recovery applied topically twice a day (contains zinc and magnesium)
Vaniply ointment (alternative to aquaphor for me) on at all times, slathered on at night
L-glutamine powder 3g morning and night
L-arginine powder 3g morning and night
vit B2 100 mg a day
Vit C 2g a day
drink lots of water and get lots of sleep
Apart from the vit B2 which i take for cracks at the corner of my mouth all these others aid in epidermal repair/collagen synthesis and have definitely sped up the healing of the lip skin, hopefully that should be done in a couple of weeks if im being enthusiastic, not going to get my hopes up after suffering for a year but as long as the lip heals completely i can wait a bit longer, compared to what i went through at the start of this process this is childs play. Ok so thats my story thanks for reading, any questions go ahead and ask or message me.