Chapter 5

Treatment

Long after the first recognizable picture in the puzzle is put together, many of the other pictures are falling into place. Some of the hardest work is yet to come. It is the most monotonous part. One particularly hard puzzle had a clear blue sky. It was just about impossible for me to distinguish each individual piece. You couldn’t look at the cover and see where the piece would fit in, they were all seemingly the same. So I started one piece at a time, trying to fit it into the hole that was left in the puzzle. Slowly the puzzle came together, as the sky was filled in.

As with the treatment of any disease or anything important in life we had to stay the course. We found what we thought would work and we kept at it. Making adjustments along the way. Never giving up. Taking supplements every day can be very monotonous and changing your lifestyle can be very challenging. It is easy to fall back into old habits.

First Do No Harm.  Hippocrates, 460-377 BC

At one point my wife and I had a big arguement. I was the tyrant, insisting on everything being perfect and pure. I felt that we had been slipping backwards, eating more refined foods. She was feeling overworked and underappreciated; she was also not willing to face the problem. I was obsessing over it. Susie wouldn’t even talk about vitiligo. Anyway we had a huge fight. She was sitting down at the dinner table and I started digging all of the unhealthy stuff in our cabinets. I started pouring all of the bad stuff on her dinner plate. White flour, mayonnaise, vegetable oil, anything I could find that was overly processed or had hydrogenated oils in it. She sat there watching me as her dish was piled high in this really gross looking mess, overflowing from her plate. I remember telling her, “here if you think this stuff is good to eat, then eat it”. I’m sure she thought I had gone insane. Finally we both looked at each other and busted out laughing. We laughed like we hadn’t laughed before; we were crying we laughed so hard. It turned out to be part of the process. We can both talk about vitiligo now.

When treating vitiligo two very important things should be addressed. First the underlying disease or condition that has caused the skin to lose its health. Only after this problem has been addressed will you start to repigment. Second, you must support your body in repigmenting.

This is how we have been treating our daughter Emily for her vitiligo.

As an engineer I come across problems weekly that I have to troubleshoot. Like most engineers I try to simplify the problem. We work on very complicated computer systems (of course they are not near as complex as the human body). When I have a problem with the system at work, I ask questions of all of the experts, the technicians and engineers. We try to address every subsystem that is affected. We systematically address each subsystem and their relation to the problem at hand. I guess that our approach for vitiligo was the same, from a systems level, whole body. We saw the vitiligo as an indication that there was something wrong. We hoped that fixing the underlying problem would help her body heal itself. It is important to find what works for you. We knew that other diseases were associated with vitiligo, so I learned as much as I could about each disease. I started to learn that many doctors had been successful treating these diseases, using a common approach. Their approaches appealed to me because of the lack of potentially damaging side effects.

Air

Clean air is important and most of the time it is abundant in our small town by the ocean. As long as the Florida forest fires aren’t burning out of control and the local launches from the Space Center aren’t exploding and dumping their toxic fuel in huge clouds. If we lived in a more polluted area, I would have invested in a whole house, air purification system.

Water

We started our therapy by cleaning up the water we drink. We drink and cook with only distilled water, since 8-9-95. I suggest a solar distiller, from SunWater Solar Inc., Pima, AZ 85543-0968 (525)485-0023. We have started adding minerals as an occasional supplement, 5-28-97; we mix it in with our carrot juice. Reverse Osmosis removes 80% of impurities, where distilled water removes 99%. As a minimum, I think it is important to use a carbon filter to remove the chlorine in the water. I am concerned about the affect of chlorine on your intestinal flora. Chlorine kills bacteria. Chlorine is added to your water to kill bacteria and it does its job well. Unfortunately when you drink it, it also kills the good bacteria in your digestive system.