I Was Miserable…

If you’ve found this site you’ve been on a journey of investigation, and most likely sheer exhaustion, trying to figure out what is happening to your skin and how to fix it.

I created this website after spending two years searching sites, reading forum posts and scouring the internet for anything that resembled what I was experiencing. It was maddening and any information regarding the most common skin conditions was inconsistent at best. It didn’t act like dermatitis, it wasn’t caused by friction, it didn’t go away when I changed laundry detergent and stopped eating dairy.

I went to the doctor when I thought it was something else.

After months of research and comparing photos I had to come to realize that I had an elderly family member who had characteristic signs of scabies and Demodex mite overgrowth.

I had the same signs.

I went in confident that I would be treated for it and came out feeling so embarrassed and dirty that I have never been back. I was told it was folliculitis from too tight of clothing. ..on my face, on my hands and feet, on every inch of my body. When I tried to explain that there was a consistent pattern to it, there was a crawling sensation under my skin, I could see white balls and what looked to be like tiny pieces of rice in, and coming out of my skin, I was told that if the treatment for folliculitis failed to come back and she would get out her teeny tiny microscope and see if there really were teeny tiny bugs in my skin…and that it’s easy to imagine. She looked at me as if I was pitiful when really I was humiliated.

She gave me antibiotics, an antihistamine, and oral and topical steroids.

The medications helped to calm the worst of the raw rash, the inflammation and the itching, but the spots kept coming with the same pattern and with the same intensity as before.

I was miserable. I felt dismissed. I was embarrassed to be seen, I didn’t feel heard, I avoided people and places as much as I could. And the idea that it might be mites…it might be SCABIES…was one of the hardest realizations I’ve had to come to and I’m no stranger to really difficult things.

But the more I learned about ectoparasites, the more convinced I was that I had them.

A dose of ivermectin on a trip to Mexico confirmed all of my suspicions. I knew that I had parasites after seeing evidence of them. We travel internationally often, eat of lot of sushi, eat pork, prefer a back alley street taco to most restaurants, have pets, walk barefoot on the beach, and garden with bare hands. I went into a pharmacy, came out with a standard US dose of ivermectin and within a couple of days it was working on the inside…but it was workin on the outside as well…and for the first time in a year my skin began to clear.

If you’ve been dealing with any type of skin issue, the relief that comes with any kind of resolution is euphoric. Finally, something will help, something will heal it, there is hope.

But with mites you quickly realize that that euphoria is very short lived.

They are highly invasive, incredibly difficult to get rid of, and in the case of scabies, highly contagious. If family members and roommates are also affected it feels insurmountable to overcome, and really difficult to talk about. While internal parasites are being recognized as a leading cause of many health conditions, external parasites are equated with poor hygiene, low income, homelessness, drug use and overcrowded conditions.

How did this happen to me?

School age children

Communal environments

Travel

Exposure to infested animals

The deeper question is WHY did this happen to me?

Aging

Lowered immunity

Acidic ph

Toxin overload

Congested detox pathways

Compromised skin barrier

Unhealthy gut microbiome

Biofilm overgrowth

In other words, with aging and lifestyle the system gets slow and sluggish and cannot process waste efficiently. That waste buildup creates the ideal terrain for parasites to thrive, multiply and become an infestation.

Traditional treatments for scabies have a very high failure rate because they only address the top layers of the skin, medications target very few strains of parasites, treatments are not strong enough and are not repeated in sync with the life cycle of ectoparasites, and most importantly, the key cleansing and regulating systems of the body are never addressed. With consistent exposure to millions of people with misdiagnosed chronic skin conditions, and no change to a hosts environment, re-infestation is eminent and goes from endemic to epidemic in a short period of time.

Once I saw it for what it really was, I saw it everywhere.

I saw it on my kids friends, my friends, the cashiers at stores, servers in restaurants, attendants on flights, spreading through reality tv contestants on private islands and love hotels. Scabies was written into the story lines of popular shows as if it was being normalized…I went into a deep depression realizing that these mites were affecting so many people because so many people had them and didn’t know it, were not being treated for it, and were in social situations that increased the spread very unknowingly. I felt there was no way to beat it if it wasn’t being treated, let alone recognized and reported. We were all contributing to this spread that was quite literally responsible for so much more than angry skin.

I began to see the associations with weakened immunity, brain fog, digestion issues and neuromotor disorders, and dots that I’ve been connecting in my career for more than two decades came together in a way that shocked me.

What if mites were the issue behind the most common skin disorders the same way we are correlating internal parasites with cancer, Alzheimers, Parkinsons, etc.?

It would be another collapse of trust in government and medicine and the disruption of billions of dollars in dermatological pharmaceuticals.

There had to be a reason it was spreading so fast and taking up residence so easily.

My background is in medicine but more on the statistics side of rising disease rates corresponding to environmental changes than hands on care. Over the last 25 years I’ve seen food, plastics, endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, pesticides, frequency and immobility raise the rates on cancer, heart disease, obesity, autoimmune diseases, and neurological disorders sky high but skin issues were never on the list or on the horizon as potential statistics.

Today skin issues are the number two reason for repeated visits to a healthcare practitioner, second to heart disease .

Something has changed in the last two decades that has made us more hospitable and more vulnerable to mites (ectoparasites).

Microorganisms and parasites are present in the food supply.
There is a severe lack of education and awareness about parasites in the US.
There are high levels of heavy metals in food, water, medicine, personal care products, industrial pollution and in the atmosphere. Parasites utilize heavy metals for fuel and protection.
There are high levels of poisonous chemicals in makeup and personal care products that disrupt the skin barrier, change the skin pH, damage the skin, clog the pores, and trap mites under thick comedogenic products.
Highly processed and artificially flavored and colored food.
Lack of movement and detox pathway flow to remove waste from the body.
High levels of stress and prolonged periods of increased cortisol.
Lack of sunlight and circadian rhythm regulation. Parasites eat melatonin.

After initial treatment with conventional medications to reduce the population and relieve the symptoms of the secondary bacterial infections, I started to address the waste that mites live on, the biofilm that keeps them protected, and the missing nutrients that alter the pH and boost the immune system to rid of or regulate the populations of both scabies and Demodex, the way our bodies are intended to.