Psoriasis Home Care Programme
Optimising your psoriasis home care routine is vital to ensure the success of your other treatments, and for ongoing management.
Home Care Programme
Optimising your home care routine is vital to ensure the success of your other treatments, and for ongoing management.
Psoriasis Home Care
A strict regime of cool bathing & moisturising with the correct emmoliants that will not damage your skin, as well as managing diet and stress are part of our home care plan for you. While this will not reduce your psoriasis significantly when you are mid-flare, it will help increase the speed of your recovery while on your medical management plan, and will help you manage your psoriasis between flares.
Your daily routine plays an important part of managing your psoriasis. A trict regime of cool bathing & moisturising with the correct emmoliants that will not damage your skin, as well as managing diet and stress are part of our home care plan for you. While this will not reduce your psoriasis significantly when you are mid-flare, it will help increase the speed of your recovery while on your medical management plan, and will help you manage your psoriasis between flares.
Bathing
We recommend bathing in cool to warm water only. Heat is not good for anybody’s skin, but especially if you have a tendency for psoriasis or eczema, it can certainly make it worse. So as cool water as you can manage while still being able to shower properly will be beneficial. While it’s not a good idea to have long showers, you do need to spend enough time in there to get clean so please don’t have freezing cold showers in winter!
We recommend using soap free, fragrance free washes, preferably ones that also include some repairing qualities to help any plaques keep their moisture and begin the repairing process. Your skin will dry out with traditional washes, and moisturisers that are too thin, so please be mindful what you use here!
We suggest using our dermatologist developed home care packs which contain all of the home care products you will need.
Moisturising
Moisturiser seems like an unlikely element to making a big difference to psoriasis and eczema, however early moisturising can actually stop plaques in their tracks in a lot of instances. Early intervention is so helpful and can be preventative. It is also a huge relief and assists in speeding up the repair process during your medical treatment.
We highly recommend moisturising multiple times a day with fragrance free moisturising creams with proven hydrating qualities and repair enzymes. Petroleum jelly and light or fragranced moisturisers won’t do the trick here.
You can order a home care pack online here, which will include all of the ingredients you will need for maximal home care.
If you have plaques in areas that are hard to reach (your back, for example) and would like to take advantage of our soothing, moisturising massage service, please click here to make a booking and one of our friendly staff will be able to make sure your skin is well hydrated and soothed.
Diet
We have had many patients over the years tell us stories about how they work out which foods or drinks can make their psoriasis flare, and how they manage that.
For example, one patient knew that every time he drank beer, his psoriasis would flare. However, his son was turning 18 and he wanted to be able to have a beer with his son! So he got prepared, had a consultation prior to the birthday party, planned to restart his treatment early and was able to minimise the flare up he experienced as a result.
Other people find that they had flares when they ate spicy food, soft drinks or tomatoes – a whole range of foods! The best way to work out what makes your psoriasis flare is to keep a food diary with the food you eat on the left and a score of how your psoriasis severity was on that day. If you keep that for 2-4 weeks, you should be well on your way to working out what your triggers are.
We have a diet tracker in our home care packs to help you with this also.
Stress
Stress isn’t good for any part of your body, and is one of the biggest contributors to deaths in Australia. It does not allow your body to repair as it should, interrupts your sleep, which is when your body should be doing most of its work to function well throughout the day, and often leads to poor dietary and fluid choices.
Managing your stress will not only help your psoriasis, but will also help your health overall, much more than you would expect.
Some great ideas for managing your stress can be found here:
Prescription oral medication is the last line of defence on late stage psoriasis that is not relieved by other treatment modalities. To access oral medication, all other treatments must have failed and a severity of psoriasis must be indicated.
Book Your Initial Review
Book an initial consultation to find out which treatment plan is best for you.