Speaking Clearly: Living In a World that Doesn’t Understand Psoriasis is a resource book that comes to psoriasis patients, or their loved ones, for free to US residents that request a copy. Having watched my own ex successfully battle the disease I can only really look back to the origin of the source of the useful information within that book.
I count myself as one of the lucky ones to have never had to go through living with psoriasis. I watched my ex put up with psoriasis though. It seemed like hell for her. All too many people are all too willing to automatically ostracize someone with the condition due simply to a lack of understanding.
From the time she was nine years old, she used to tell me, not a day went by that someone, somewhere, didn’t make a crack about ‘what’s wrong with you?’ So few folks seemed to understand that psoriasis isn’t some sort of a ‘disease’ you catch from someone. Hardly anyone didn’t treat her as ‘contagious’ somehow because of her psoriasis.
(I took her on a date, kissed her, and married her myself. Once more people understand this condition isn’t some sort of ‘communicable disease’ then more people will see the beauty that can be with a patient of this condition also. There’s nothing to fear with it either. She and I managed together because we both understood it to be an autoimmune disorder and nothing more.
Psoriasis isn’t any more of a reason to not love someone that would a scar be…but here I am digressing already.)
One of the biggest challenges for my ex was how much lame-ass advice she was given about how to treat psoriasis. Some approaches showed some results. But there were always lousy side affects. Coal tar smelled. Sun lamps took time…and we had four kids running around. Her biggest challenge was just to find out for herself what psoriasis information would really help her win the battle and what psoriasis information wouldn’t do a lick of good.