My own frustrating story:
had weird skin issues diagnosed as a variety of things for years and unsuccessfully treated with a variety of prescription and OTC remedies. During the pandemic I built up some spare capacity to overcome my usual maintenance helplessness around it and decided to throw literally every internet intervention for every possible diagnosis at it at the same time and then do binary search for specific things that worked. What wound up working? Hydrogen fucking peroxide. Something that many people say has no chance of working. It’s been 2 years now and my symptoms are 80+% better. My belated hypothesis is that the underlying cause is something to do with skin ph and just regularly using more acidic washes and lotions (eg salicylic or uric acid) also seems to help and make the peroxide less necessary. This seems to have fallen into the hole of ‘because there’s an adjacent woo thing (ph is often the domain of BS fake medicine) doctors were incapable of thinking anything near it’.
My own frustrating story: had weird skin issues diagnosed as a variety of things for years and unsuccessfully treated with a variety of prescription and OTC remedies. During the pandemic I built up some spare capacity to overcome my usual maintenance helplessness around it and decided to throw literally every internet intervention for every possible diagnosis at it at the same time and then do binary search for specific things that worked. What wound up working? Hydrogen fucking peroxide. Something that many people say has no chance of working. It’s been 2 years now and my symptoms are 80+% better. My belated hypothesis is that the underlying cause is something to do with skin ph and just regularly using more acidic washes and lotions (eg salicylic or uric acid) also seems to help and make the peroxide less necessary. This seems to have fallen into the hole of ‘because there’s an adjacent woo thing (ph is often the domain of BS fake medicine) doctors were incapable of thinking anything near it’.