Acne Care and Treatment

Whether you’re a teenager who is noticing acne for the first time or an adult who anticipated permanently waving goodbye to it forever, you’re in good company.  The careers of Cameron Diaz, P. Diddy, Jessica Simpson, Alicia Keyes, Mike Meyers, and Vanessa Williams have thrived despite their continuing complextion problems with acne.

And think about some of those rugged faces from the silver screen.  From the looks of it, Tommy Lee Jones, Laurence Fishburne, Bill Murray, Edward James Olmos, James Woods, and the great British actor and movie star Richard Burton (who married Elizabeth Taylor, considered to be one of the most beautiful women in the world) more than likely had pretty wicked acne when they were teenagers.

Ofcourse, heavy makeup, favorable lighting, medications, and experienced dermatologists have probably helped them.  We won’t be able to provide you with your own personal makeup artist or a lighting technician to accompany you to school or work, but we do have some good recommendations on how to use acne-fighting medications and find a good dermatologist.

You may not aspire to be a movie star.  But the names mentioned are just a small number of people who have achieved success in an area where looks count the most.  Countless other people exist in all walks of life who went beyond their acne to become successes in their fields.  And so can you.

Because your acne appears on your face and everyone can see it, you may feel desperate to make it go away.  But because it’s not life threatning, you may feel reluctant or embarrassed to go to your healthcare provider about it.  Certain people prey on that knowledge.  They want to sell you expensive over-the-counter acne “cures” that don’t do you any good, or get you to order them after watching testimonial-filled infomercials.

The people giving those acne “testimonial” on TV are almost always professional actors reading a script.  And even those stories that are “real” generally mean nothing.  You can always find one or two success stories while ignoring 99.9 percent of failures.

Even if it’s on TV, on the radio, the internet, or in magazines, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true.  The world of acne fighting is filled with snake oils and false promises.

There are promises that guarantee “five day cures” for your acne, and there are the real slow pokes that state, “try this all time-tested home treatment for acne and have clearer blemish-free skin within 30 days of use”.  Make sure you do your research and avoid getting scammed.

Also, check out QuackWatch, a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to combat health realted frauds, myths, fads, and fallacies pertaining to health-realted issues.  Its primary focus is on quackery-related information. 

For those of you who are squeamish or are dog lovers, skip to the next paragraph.  Seventeenth-Century Britons were as concerned about acne as we are today.  According to an old manuscript of home remedies that was recently discovered, people with acne were advised to cut the heads off two puppies, hang them up by their heels to bleed, collect the blood, mix the blood with white wine, and apply the concoction to the face.  Gross!  Don’t try it; it won’t work!

At the beginning of the 20th century, most of the acne treatments involved the correction of intestinal disorders such as indigestion and constipation.  Recommended anti-acne regimens included low-fat and low-sugar diets.  Sound familiar?  Excessive sweating was discouraged, and - get this - some doctors recommended that erotic preoccupation be avoided (without a doubt, a difficult prescription to follow).

Active surgical treatment at that time included opening up the and draining acne lesions (they’re the zits), vigorous scrubbing, steaming, and washing with soap and hot water.  All of this was followed by the application of foul-smelling chemicals including sulfur.  For difficult-to-manage acne in middle-aged women, arsenic - both applied to the skin and injected into it - was sometimes used!  Wow!

In the middle of the 20th century, there would be teenagers that would go back to school with red, scaly faces the day after they visited their dermatologists.  They were subjected to restricted diets, carbon dioxide slush, superficial X-ray treatments, and ultraviolet light exposures, only to be followed by self-applied rigorous cleansings, scrubs, and chemical peeling agents.  Ugh, no wonder their faces looked like red apples!  It seems barbaric today, but that’s all they had to treat acne at that time.  Believe me, people who have acne today are much better off today!