Resolving eczema in a fully breastfed baby

Despite often being covered in weeping, itching eczema, four month old ‘Kevin’ was usually a surprisingly happy baby.

His mother ‘Roxy’ had cleverly worked out how to wrap his arms using his body weight to hold them in place so that he couldn’t constantly scratch himself (pictured above). If he scratched, he was capable of doing so until he was ‘red raw and bleeding’. His skin had been clear and normal until he was a month old, but had been a source of great anxiety ever since then.

In particular, Roxy worried over the continuous cycle of treatment Kevin needed to keep his skin relatively free of eczema. At this point, she had to treat him several times a day with corticosteroid creams to heal the most recent event. Scars and dry healed patches of skin can be seen on Kevin’s legs in the picture above.

Each time Roxy thought she could stop treating Kevin with corticosteroid creams, his eczema abruptly flared back into life. And he’d had repeated courses of oral antibiotics for his constant skin infections. It was unending, a miserable cycle that deprived Kevin of the normal use of his hands. She was also anxious about side effects from the drugs.

Two weeks after removing all problem foods from her diet, 80% of Kevin’s eczema cleared without the need for simultaneous corticosteroids. Roxy was thrilled and continued her dietary exclusions happily for the next 18 months until Kevin weaned from the breast. To start with, she found that it took six weeks for Kevin’s gut to heal and from then on, his bowel motions were completely normal. From runny brownish yellow, they became just one every day or two, semi-formed and mustard yellow.

As a toddler, Kevin tended to have small eczema breakouts from time to time that were easily controlled as long as Roxy gave him daily doses of probiotics free from food allergens.