Does Long Term Acne Medications Work?

When acne arises, you can easily panic. It's natural. You have a date coming up, you're starting a new job, and you're making a presentation in front of your class. Whatever the situation, you have a good reason to want to clear it up as fast as possible. So it probably seems to make sense to go to an expert in the field, a dermatologist. Dermatologists are doctors after all, and it's natural to feel a sense of security in taking a doctor's advice. There's nothing wrong with going to a dermatologist of course, but you might find in consulting one that the cure offered can sometimes be worse than the disease!

One of the most commonly prescribed 'cures' for acne are antibiotics or steroids, which are taken internally. The body and its parts are of course interconnected, especially through the circulatory system. It's common medical knowledge that whatever you do in one part of the body in trying to heal it, can affect other parts of the body adversely. When you take steroids, or antibiotics, they work to eradicate bacteria which can be the cause of acne. But at the same time, they work at killing other kinds of bacteria in the body, the 'good' bacteria.

Within the body there are these good bacteria which are natural and called probiotics. These bacteria are beneficial and will protect one's gastrointestinal tract from parasites and fungi, suppressing the growth of potentially harmful bacteria. Probiotics enhance the protective barrier in the digestive tract, significantly improving immune function. This promotes a healthy liver, a necessary component of good skin condition. The problem with antibiotics is that they kill bacteria indiscriminately. Think of a bomb going off inside your body rather than snipers picking off specific targets. The liver can be affected by then, and a weakened liver can paradoxically be the cause of a bad skin condition. So the treatment can be causing the problem you set out to fix! Surely that doesn't make a lot of sense! The damage within your body due to these medications can upset the body's natural balance to the degree that you're dealing with problems you didn't even start out with. It's a little like the TV show "House," where every weekend a patient goes into that hospital with a small problem which always escalates into a much, much larger one.

So let's assume you'd rather not use the "shock and awe" approach in your body, in treating your acne. Let's say you'd rather use a more restrained approach. You'd like a healthy alternative to the aggressive and invasive action of antibiotics and steroids. Are there such treatments that work as well as the war-like approach? You don't want to invade your body and take it over, you just want to just change your skin condition for the better. The good news is, there are plentiful healthy and natural alternative treatments available that work as well, if not better, than antibiotics and steroids. Besides that, guess what? They usually cost you a lot less too!

*Definition, Probiotic, wikipedia.com

*Acne Treatments, CosmeticSurgery.com