My Acne Cure

Acne is a catchall term for skin blemish conditions. It manifests as a variety of lesions and pustules on the surface of the skin, often in visible places, face chest upper arms and back. There appear to be two types of acne, "vulgaris" which is a terrible medical term for "simple" and "rosacea" meaning "redness".

The acne on my face was the most upsetting. After years of observing it there appeared to be no apparent specific trigger, and although eating a wheat free diet did help reduce the inflammation, it never really was a cure.

I wore heavy make up all the way through my teens, twenties, thirties and forties to cover my acne up. I found creative ways to hang my hair strategically over my forehead spots and dreaded the summer months, exposing my skin was excruciatingly embarrassing whilst everyone else, it seemed, languished in the hot sun, tanning their creamy clear complexions.

I spent a great deal of time in the doctors surgery looking for cures, even in my forties when the deep pustules were beginning to leave deeper scars and my skin was no longer healing them.

Actually, as a young girl, I probably would have been quite pretty, but my confidence was wrecked in my early years at secondary at school when my 'given' nick name was "Spot" . I don't think I ever truly recovered - until I discovered my cure, now I feel just 'ordinary'.

I now have a very alternate view about the manifestation of acne and indeed many other diseases. I believe it is a subset illness as a result of a compromised immune system. There may even be many immune systems, each operating within their own area of expertise, each operating within different conditions of terrain, for example temperature, nutrition and alkalinity, all of which are underpinned by a master control, that of maintaining a body temperature of 37C or 98.6F.

In spite of everything i have read, there appears to be no one causal common factor that the medical profession have identified for episodes of acne. One observation I had made was that when I was on holiday in a hot country, my acne would reduce and almost go away completely. Because I believed it to be a disease in itself, I thought topical treatments, as answers, were the cure, as in the example of UV light whilst I was on these hot holidays. This approach wasted, for me, many years looking in the wrong places for my own cure. The clue I had missed, was the external environment, or more specifically, the heat.

• Reset my low body temperature from 35.8C to 37C.
• Reduced my metabolism
• Introduced a supplement regimen

Current medical treatment appears to offer a three pronged approach to offering relief from acne. Topical or dermal interference, dietary advice and antibiotics or other pharmaceuticals.

Whilst i never opted for any of the more invasive treatments on offer, I did run the gauntlet of most of the topical acne treatments which produced no long term beneficial effects. In fact, if my thinking about acne as a subset disease is correct the these treatments are just that, simple treatments. They may have some effect during the administration, but when the treatments stop, the acne resumes.

In addition, my dietary efforts to overcompensate for nutritional deficiencies by supplementation didn't work, supplementing in itself certainly wasn't the cure all I had hoped it would be - I never managed to achieve that elusive peachy skin.

In 2009, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Not only had I manifested many subset illnesses alongside my acne, I now had a big problem.

It began to occur to me that these small illnesses that had been accumulating over the years were all associated with something, some common factor. Unraveling what exactly that was took me about a year to research. I had plenty of time, i was in the workings of the medical machine going through a brutal chemotheraputic and invasive cancer treatments and was unable to work.

Initially I decided I probably had some sort of thyroid mal-function, all the symptoms were similar to a hypothyroidism. However, there were two problems with this, my TSH or thyroid stimulating hormone level, was nearly normal, and my very low body temperature would not respond to and thyroid medication. i seemed to me I was looking in the wrong place.

This low body temperature, which was cycling around 35.8C started to become my main focus of attention. I searched for anyone who had fixed a low body temperature by any other means than thyroid supplementation and came across the work of Steve Richfield, the only Central Metabolic Control System Therapist in the world. Steve had cured himself of a serious idiopathic heart condition and discovered that when he had fixed his temperature, other subset illnesses began to fix themselves.

When I contacted Steve I was at my lowest ebb, mentally and physically. He guided me through what turned out to be a very difficult "resetting" process. A process that took my body temperature from 35.8C to 37C. Within about two weeks I was operating more frequently at 37C or 98.6F. Initially, on days I achieved this 'normal' temperature, I began to notice how well I felt.

The plan was to teach my brain to 'like' being at 37C. It took in total about two years to retrain my brain to 'like' operating at 37C or 98.6F. Over the course of that two years I noticed many of my sub set illnesses began to disappear; pompholyx, joint pain, nasal polyps, dry eyes, fungal toes, the list goes on and was pretty extensive. These small illnesses that I had simply put down to part of my aging process, were being cured. It took a further third year to consolidate my temperature.

Steve was incredibly patient and exceptionally knowledgeable. He helped me every step of the way through the process.

My acne was one of the last diseases to be fixed. After a few months of operating at 37C my skin was clearing and I felt well enough to start to look much more closely at my diet and deficiencies. I trialed and tested many food supplements, and during this I discovered, that at 37C, I no longer needed large quantities of anything to make a difference, so I was able to incorporate small amounts of missing nutrients into my diet. This was the case with most supplements with the exception of Vitamin C

I had read during my research that vitamin C deficiency causes some problems with gums, a condition I had always had, and interestingly, hair on the arms. Actually I had no hair on my arms, and hadn't had from being a teenager but I do remember being very hairy as a young girl!

So I introduced increasing doses of vitamin C. Incredibly, at around 8 grams the hair on my arms began to grow and my gums were less tender, I had one remaining fungal toe that started to heal and best of all my acne disappeared. My skin is very much smoother, i rarely get any spots of any type and even the blackheads around my nose are vastly reduced, my hair is also no longer lanky and greasy.

I have remaining some residual evidence that I had skin problems in the passed and they may never disappear, but I no longer wear make up unless I want to for the sheer pleasure of it. Although it is a pity i discovered this in my mid fifties, it is better late than never.

My thinking is that the skin is like a window on anything going on inside the body, if the body is stressed, then something is wrong with the immune systems and this will then be reflected in how we look.

Now, if I am every feeling unwell, or my skin is developing blemishes, I always check and fix my temperature first.

This image shows my skin three years after resetting my low body temperature and about eighteen months after starting a vitamin C protocol. Some of the unevenness and redness in the skin caused by scarring is just visible, but even these are beginning to fade with each passing year.

I no longer feel as though I have to 'manage' my condition and actually often forget I had a skin problem. One of the most marked differences is that when people talk to me their eyes engage with mine instead of wandering from blemish to blemish on my face. Happy days!

Anyone with this disfiguring condition might consider taking their body temperature, this should be 37C during the day or 36.3 during sleep. A low temperature selection malfunction, or central hypothermia, if corrected, can help heal minor idiopathic chronic illnesses and may avert a big one.

My next project? How to cure that grey hair!