Clinical diagnosis of eczema is most commonly based on the appearance of a patient’s skin and on their family and personal history. However, because there are many similar conditions to eczema (e.g. psoriasis), your medical practitioner will have to examine your skin lesions in order to rule out alternatives problems.
They may even need to carry out a skin lesion biopsy to establish exactly what you are suffering from, although in most cases this is unlikely to be necessary.
Once your medical practitioner has established that you are indeed suffering from eczema, it is likely that they will recommend various courses of action depending upon the severity of your eczema problem.
Nevertheless, irrespective of what kind of treatment they prescribe for you, the ultimate objectives of the treatment will always be the same:
• To control and reduce itching;
• To reduce skin inflammation;
• To loosen and then remove scaly skin lesions;
• To reduce the outbreak of new lesions; and
• To clear any infection that has already set in.
There are many strategies that your medical practitioner may recommend you should adopt as a way of reducing the severity of your problem, ranging from moisturizing your skin (more of which later), applying topical pharmaceuticals, or in more serious cases, they may even recommend oral medications.
Most commonly, the medications that will be prescribed for treating your eczema are likely to be based on corticosteroids, a type of steroid hormone that is naturally produced in the adrenal cortex.
As a first option, most medical practitioners will recommend a topical cream or ointment that is based on corticosteroids as a first-line treatment for eczema. Many such corticosteroid creams can be bought across the counter without a prescription in Western countries, which suggests (quite correctly) that the creams that you buy are not especially strong.
They are unlikely to have any particularly adverse side-effects either, but their effectiveness may be fairly limited.
If your condition continues to deteriorate or does not improve, your doctor may prescribe you a corticosteroid cream or lotion, meaning that this particular topical treatment is likely to be considerably stronger than those that you buy across the counter.
It is widely accepted within the medical community that long-term usage of corticosteroids can have adverse side-effects, such as irreversible skin thinning. Consequently, if your doctor prescribes topical corticosteroid based lotions or creams, it is likely that they will recommend that you only use them for a short period of time.
