What Doctors Don’t Tell You About Acne

Modern medicine considers mild to moderate acne an acceptable feature of growing up. If you go to your doctor for help with whiteheads, blackheads, or pimples, chances are you’ll be given a prescription for an antibiotic or benzoyl peroxide, or both, and sent on your way. If you have especially deep skin infection causing nodules or cysts, you may be put on Retin-A or Accutane, and if you have the more aggressive forms of acne that cause pimples to grow together all over the top half of the body (acne conglobata) or the kind of acne that results from the immune system’s attack on an ingrown hair (acne keloidalis nuchae), you will probably get a referral to a dermatologist for laser therapy or surgical reconstruction procedures.
There are two critically important things everyone who has acne needs to know about medical treatments for acne:

• Most medically supervised treatments for acne significantly reduce the number and size of blemishes.
• No medically supervised treatments for acne get rid of all your cysts, nodules, blackheads, pimples, and scars, and some prescription therapies offer only short-term relief.

Acne is caused by a combination of factors. The lining of a pore in the skin starts producing skin at a high rate. Dead skin cells accumulate in the pore faster than the sebum it makes can push them to the surface. The oily sebum made by the sebaceous gland at the base of the pore gets trapped under dead skin, along with acne bacteria. The immune system generates inflammation to kill the bacteria, but the bacteria release chemicals that target surrounding healthy skin. Squeezing or mashing pimples forces acne bacteria deeper into the skin, where they can continue to trick the immune system into destroying more and more healthy tissue while pink scar tissue grows over them and locks them inside the skin.
Stopping any step in this process will reduce acne. But the best acne treatment will stop all of these steps, which is necessary for achieving blemish-free skin. Medical treatment zeroes in on just one step of the process and usually works for that one step. And traditional home acne care suffers the same limitation.

You might also like:

• Home Remedies For Back Acne
• Home Remedies for Blackheads
• Home Remedies for Fair Skin

Source: http://www.facingacne.com/