Navigating Health Challenges: Our Experience with Skin Rashes and Children's Wellness
In our homeschooling journey, we’ve encountered many challenges, but none have been as unexpectedly disruptive as the health issues our children faced. This happened during the Spring of 2024. News consistently came to our social media feed that skin infections that is resistant to medication is spreading among children and senior adults in our area. My children were not spared. The rashes started as small red patches that resemble chicken skin. These rashes spread all over their bodies, leaving us with questions and concerns that no parent is ever quite prepared for. While homeschooling is often about managing academics and routines, this experience reminded us that health is a foundational part of our children’s well-being—and it needed our immediate attention. In this blog, I want to share our personal experience with these skin rashes, how we managed them, and the lessons we learned along the way. This is a break from the usual homeschooling topics, but it’s a vital aspect of our family’s journey that I feel is important to discuss.
Early Signs of Infection: An Unwelcome Surprise
News reports on social media had been warning of a medication-resistant skin infection spreading among children and senior adults in our area, and it wasn’t long before my children were affected. The first signs of the skin infection were subtle but concerning. What began as small, red patches resembling chicken skin that spread across my children’s bodies. At first, we thought it was just a common rash, something that would pass on its own. However, as the spots grew and multiplied, it became clear that this was something more serious. This unwelcome surprise left us feeling helpless and uncertain, forcing us to shift our focus from our usual homeschooling routines to address their health needs. At this stage, it is crucial to identify the type of rash. Is it fungal or auto-immune triggered? If it's fungal, we know we need to address it quickly.
Treatment: A Losing Battle
Our children were prescribed different lines of medication: from anti-fungal cream, corticosteroid cream, and anti-histamine medications. We used the anti-fungal treatment but did not expose our children to corticosteroid and anti-histamines believing that the side-effects are not worth it. Treatment seemed to be promising at first but were not permanent. This went on for months and we're getting desperate. It was heart breaking.
The rashes as my children describe, are itchy and would consistently disrupt their sleep. This also cause them to scratch the affected area aggressively, which in turn cause the skin to breakout and worsens the swelling. Moreover, it causes the rash to spread more. (At this point you may think I will sell you something in the end. I will not, don't worry. I will just be sharing what we used that proved effective and most of them are free albeit may not be readily available in some areas. This story has a good ending by the way.)
Realizing that medications offered by the "socially acceptable" medical institutions (allopathic medicine, conventional medicine) are not working, we engaged into research and came across more natural remedies.
Natural Remedies and the Scientific Method
(A short disclaimer: we're not claiming that you distance yourselves from conventional medicine, I am just describing our experience and what worked for us. What worked for us maybe different on what may work for others. Please do your own research and use your own common sense.)
I and my wife both graduated from university level education. That being said, the university training does not make you readily gravitate towards natural or alternative healing. We were always thought however to use the scientific method. There's a popular quote that was attributed to Albert Einstein says "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results" (although there's no evidence he's the original proponent of this idea, just saying!). This resonated in our heads. We have been trying conventional medicine and the results are always the same. It only deals with the symptoms but does not really cure my children's cases. One could easily come to a conclusion- that either these medicines are not appropriate to my children's case or they really are not intended to cure them altogether. We had to lean on our own research.
We learned that there are traditional medications that dealt with cases similar to our children's that not only has proven effective but also worked within significantly shorter period of time. These testimonials are not enough for us. We should at least confirm other independent claims plus a scientific, if possible peer-reviewed article should be available expositing chemical constituents that at least establish the remedies' effectiveness and/or side-effects.
Coming up with a Short List
After engaging nights and weeks of research, we finally came up with our own short list of possible natural remedies to treat our children's rashes. Here's our list and our experience:
- Epsom Salt Baths: This has proven very effective with relaxing our children and controlled the spread, swelling, and itchiness. It did not however, neutralize the rashes completely.
- Black Walnut Tincture: There are promising research about black walnut. There are articles that claims it may be effective as anti-cancer, anti-fungal, and anti-oxidant treatment (here's one example). It's a no brainer to test this out. We tried to search in Amazon but it's almost always out of stock. In our case we found a local apothecary that sells the tincture. The results are promising. It neutralized the infection in matter of days. The results we never see using antifungal and anti-inflammatory creams. We used it consistently with Epsom Salt Baths. The downside however, is that, it stings. I can do a more detailed separate blog about black walnut later.
- Defense Medicated Soap: We also found the Defense Medicated Soap, albeit not as fast acting as the Black Walnut, also showed promising results. It prevents re-occurrence of the breakouts. Logically, the tincture handles the visible rashes, the Defense Soap handles the spread and breakouts on their early stages. The downside is the cost of the soap in Canada. As of this writing, it has a price tag of $29.
- Garlic: I will mention garlic here. This has proven to be very effective in our case as well, but this has not been our preferred method. Although it was able to neutralize the rashes and spreading, it stings painfully and we don't want our child to consistently have the garlic odor. We had to stick to our walnut, epsom salt, and defense soap combination.
We use stick to this treatment regimen for a span of two weeks and it effectively cleared our little girls skin. As for my boy, it's a different story. There are consistent breakouts. We learned that the medication cannot continue for more than a month as it would load our little one's liver and kidneys.
Switching to All Natural Diet: A More Sustainable Approach to Healing
This maybe worthy of its own blog but as a brief introduction, this approach has proven effective when combined with the remedies we used. It activates and optimizes the body's own defenses, basically teaching it which ones friendly and which one's foe; and induces self-healing. We have observed that although the remedies we used effectively neutralized the current rashes, we still witness breakouts and flares. We learned that aside from the treatment, we had to look at the food we eat. To keep this short, we switched to local farm produced greens, grass-fed meat, and zero packed foods. This in fact was very hard as everything, every food we eat are prepared from scratch. No more sugary deserts, no more bread (weep!). We also increased consumption of food rich in probiotics i.e. homemade kimchi, sauerkraut, etc.
Conclusion
We are now out of the woods, and this experience has taught us one of the most important lessons of our adult lives: our health is our most valuable resource, yet it’s often the one we neglect the most. This journey also opened our eyes to the enduring value of natural and traditional remedies. While these approaches have stood the test of time, it’s crucial to do our due diligence to discern what truly works and what may simply be myth.
Ultimately, healing isn’t something that conventional or alternative medicine alone can provide. It begins from within. In our case, this was activated through mindful changes in our diet—choosing foods with minimal exposure to free radicals, as natural and unprocessed as possible. This holistic approach not only restored our children’s health but also reminded us of the power of simple, intentional choices in nurturing wellness.