As a parent, you’ll do just about anything to take care of your chidlren and keep them healthy—and that’s exactly what we did with our daughter and her eczema.
Starting at just a few days old, our beautiful baby girl developed red spots on her cheeks. We started with the typical “watch and wait” approach for what we and our pediatrician suspected was baby acne, only the blemishes didn’t get better. Instead, they got progressively worse. After a week or so, we realized that we were dealing with atopic dermatitis, not acne. [Note: atopic dermatitis is the technical term for eczema]
We didn’t sweat it at first. After all, our son had broken out in patches of eczema as a baby that cleared up quickly with some good skin care and cleaning up his allergens. We started doing the same for our daughter, using a colloidal oatmeal cream and testing her for food allergies. The spots on her cheeks calmed down at first but a few days later the patches started popping up on her neck, chesk, thighs, elbows and more. We rubbed her down with every cream we could find, pumped her full of probiotics, and even tried bleach baths per the recommendation of our pediatrician (which are exactly as yucky as they sound) to no avail. We also implemented wet therapy, which if you’re not familiar involves putting your baby to bed in wet pajamas. It seemed promising for a few days until she flared up worse than ever and back to dry pajamas it was. Thank goodness. Even the steroid creams didn’t work, which in some ways was a relief becuase that was really the last thing I wanted to be lathering on my infant.
It was all-the-time-itching for our poor little one and we were just barely getting by: Eucerin ointment followed by a thick layer of Aquaphor, and finally full body footie pajamas to reduce scratching. It kept her from bleeding, at least, but her skin was still red, rashy, and super flared up all the time.
What Finally Changed for Us…
It always seems to go like this, but one day I accidentally happened upon some research about ozonated olive oil as an innovative treatment for skin disorders including infant eczema. I was majorly skeptical at first because the study seemed too good to be true…an 80% improvement in less than 5 days with a completely clean safety profile? But the more I searched PubMed, I saw more of the same. The research was extremely promising and I couldn’t for the life of me find anything that pointed to toxicity, or any reason that we shouldn’t try it for our daughter.
So, we tried it. And it worked.
The results were incredibly shocking.
You can see in the pictures above what a tremendous change it was. The top photo is her left leg about 4 hours after we first applied the cream and the bottom picture was 40 hours later (so really only 36 hours after the first picture.) You can see that the redness and inflammation have calmed down and the skin is actually regenerating. She clearly isn’t as itchy because she doesn’t scratch at every opportunity, and she hasn’t had any broken skin since we started using the cream. The left picture is her beautiful, clear face today.
But there’s always a down side, isn’t there? For us, and for other people who have tried it, I think, the scent of the cream is intense. It smells like ozone, which makes sense because ozonated oil is produced by bubbling ozone gas through olive oil until it becomes solid. The ozone is how it all works actually, as the ozonides formed from bubbling ozone into the oil fill a dual purpose of killing the Staphylococcus bacteria responsible for making such angry red skin in the first place, and also stimulate healing of the tissue itself.
The smell really stuck around, though. Within those few days with just twice daily application, our daughter, her clothes, her bed, and anyone who touched her (i.e. me) smelled strongly of ozone. Of course, it was worth it to keep her safe and healthy (things she was objectively not when so darn flared up) but I figured if there was a way I could make the ozone oil less odorific, that’d be great. So, I combined the ozonated oil with shea butter and coconut oil, two natural emollients that have pleasant but potent scents of their own, and they did a fabulous job taking the ozone scent down several notches and helping lock in moisture to the skin, something the ozonated oils didn’t do as well because you only need such a thin layer to treat the redness.
But I still had some questions…
Why was nobody talking about this?
Smells aside, ozonated oils work for infant eczema. They worked for our daughter and it worked in the research, so what really baffled me was why in the world nobody was talking about this. I had never, ever heard of ozonated oil before. Our pediatrician had never heard about it, I’d never learned about it in school (and mind you I am trained in natural medicine), and I had spent hours upon hours scouring the internet for some missing link that would help our baby. Never did I come across anything about ozonated oil for infant eczema. To me, this was a major problem.
Topical creams are not root cause solutions, but sometimes you just need something that will calm down the suffering, especially when it’s a baby at stake. I’m still investigating what’s going on with my daughter’s gut that led her to develop such uncontrolled eczema in the first place, but in the meantime I’m so grateful that we found something that keeps her comfortable.
Please, for the sake of you and your baby’s skin, try it! I so wish that I had learned of and tried it myself sooner. And if you do try it and it does help you, please let me know so I can celebrate too!
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I’m Dr. Alexandra MacKillop, a functional medicine physician, food scientist and nutrition expert.
I specialize in women’s health & hormones, addressing concerns like fertility, disordered eating, PCOS, endometriosis, dysmenorrhea (painful periods), PMS symptoms like bloating and mood changes and more.
If you’re looking for a new way to approach your health, I’d love to work with you. Click to learn more.
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