Re: Looking great the past week and met someone! :)

Great news, Daniel. Yeah, I think telling people close to me helped at the time to get over some social anxieties, but now that my condition isn't so noticeable, I don't bother mentioning it unless someone asks why I'm so health conscious and getting tested or dieting or whatever it might be. In the past couple years, I think only a few people have asked. I appreciated reading your thoughts, but the high prevalence of Accutane-induced peeling lips takes away from your trauma theory . . . I think there is another connection there, perhaps just an overactive immune response to the Vitamin A toxicosis. Also, I'm wondering if it's the brain necessarily causing the incorrect signalling or if it's rather signals in the immune response and skin cell production, the cytokines and keratinocytes. If you leave the skin on to fight programmed cell death, the Catch-22 of course is when bacteria and fungi feed on dead skin it awakens an immune response, which attempts to shed the compromised cells.

Yeah jsl123, I'd say the number of people posting here and contributing has sadly stayed constant at about 20 per week on average. And there's probably 300-400 people checking the site somewhat regularly, with over 10,000 interested people out there if you look at some of the old posts, even taking into account obsessive page edits and refreshes (I'm guilty here). It truly would be great to have an efficient way to compare symptoms and case histories among this larger sample of the population (which may be 1,000,000 for all we know), and record successes and failures, so that we might divide and conquer our conditions better. I think a major division would be people with inflammation and people without significant inflammation, and people who developed the condition after trauma/biting/picking versus it coming out of nowhere/ or as a reaction to Accutane.

Even though I don't have noticeable inflammation, I'm trying out a treatment that is natural, non-steroidal and anti-inflammatory, calendula-infused avocado oil mixed with 0.07% methylcobalamin (a bio-available form of Vitamin B-12). It's a variation on a common plaque Psoriasis treatment, which usually comes in cream form. My version is not on store shelves, though -- I'm making it. Of course, I'll let y'all know if it helps at all in the next couple weeks or if it irritates my lips in any way (it can cause allergic reactions, so I'll be sure to start small).

Peace,
C.S.