Psychodermatology: How Stress Affects Skin
About psychodermatology, The discipline exploring the relationship of psychological states and skin behavior did not start talking yesterday - nevertheless, it still remains an area that is not too widely known. Today, when the interest of society and medicine to mental health is only increasing, it seems that psychodermatology has every chance of becoming a promising direction. We asked the blogger Adel Miftakhov to tell how one can assess the scientific and practical potential of psychodermatology - and how to understand what it is all about.
Interdisciplinarity is a bright trend of the scientific world. It implies that problems and ideas should be considered in the framework of not one science, but several, connecting knowledge from other areas. This has not bypassed medicine: the term "holistic" critical reader is, if not with a laugh, then at least with distrust, although in reality it is one of the traditional medical approaches. It takes into account all possible factors affecting the patient’s condition, from his mental state to heredity. Simply put, all modern medicine is holistic, just after the term was adopted by representatives of alternative currents, the word was rarely used in scientific circles.
Psychodermatology is a logical consequence of a holistic approach; besides it, there is psycho-gynecology, psychocardiology, psycho-orthopedics, and so on. This direction studies the diseases that are on the border of psychiatry and dermatology. It seems to everyone that the psychological state of a person affects both the organism as a whole and the skin in particular - for example, we sweat from stress. Why invent a new term if modern medicine is already focused on interdisciplinarity? At the recent summit on human interaction with the environment, Idriss Aberkein, a popularizer of science, noted that sometimes new names allow us to pay attention to the problem and, as a result, to receive funding - a kind of terminological rebranding occurs. But besides this, it is sometimes important to formalize what is already understandable at the level of logic, into something tangible, in order to begin to talk confidently about it.
Psychodermatology divides diseases into categories - however, the young current has not yet invented a universal division. Some propose to distinguish three subspecies of psychodermatological diseases: primary, secondary, and psycho-physiological. The damages that a person inflicts on himself due to his mental features, syndromes and neuroses fall into the primary. It can be injuries, and compulsive skin abrasions, and simple scratches. Secondary - disorders that occur as a result of skin features: for example, when a person with acne develops depression due to social condemnation. In 2015, in the United States conducted a study, according to which 35% of people with dermatological disorders were diagnosed with depression, while usually this number does not exceed 7%. Psychophysiological disorders are the most difficult category. These are exactly the conditions of the skin that appear or are aggravated by stress. One of them is atopic dermatitis: anyone who encounters it knows that anxiety aggravates manifestations. This is true for acne, allergies, psoriasis, rosacea, pigmentation disorders and alopecia.
The way skin features are associated with stress has been well studied — it is assumed that the model is as follows. The brain responds to stress simultaneously in three different ways: by increasing the amount of stress hormones, stimulating the sympathetic nervous system, and by increasing the production of neuropeptides and neurotransmitters. All these components actively influence the immune cells in the skin, which are also called obese. This effect results in a violation of the immune functions of the skin, and this, in turn, leads to diseases, problematic conditions or exacerbations. That is, the endocrine, nervous, and immune systems are involved in this system - all at once.
Like any new direction, psychodermatology is being criticized. For example, in 2013, Israeli dermatologists published a review of psychodermatological research and came to several conclusions. First, despite the enormous amount of research on the relationship between the psyche and the skin, there are practically no statistically significant confirmations among them. Partly due to the fact that stress is generally very difficult to measure, and it is judged subjectively. On the other hand, researchers are focused on proving that stress actually affects the skin, but they are not particularly interested in whether the patient's condition improves after psychotherapy. Simply put, we know that the relationship is, but do not yet know exactly what to do with it. But five years have passed since the article was published, and something has changed.
Michael Stevens, author of one of the most popular YouTube channels, Vsauaue, together with Canadian McGill University, set up an experiment during which children were placed on an MRI device that was turned off and told that he was teaching their brain how to heal diseases. Children had different disorders: migraine, ADHD, and one of the girls had eczema, which was aggravated by neurotic skin scrape. The results of the experiment turned out to be surprising: after a few weeks of “sessions” in all children, including the girl, the condition improved significantly. Of course, the results cannot be called absolutely reliable and statistically significant, and the experiment itself is not entirely about treatment, but rather about placebo - but that’s why it never ceases to be interesting. In fact, no therapy was carried out with the children, and the idea worked anyway — the researchers call it the power of speculation.
Psychodermatology in no way denies the traditional measures, but rather suggests psychotherapy as an additional treatment tool. Psychotherapy, meditation and persuasion, most likely, really help, just for the time being it is not very clear how good. To limit treatment only to them today will not be any reasonable doctor, but you should not refuse them either, if potentially they can improve the skin condition or help the patient to take it.
Photo: kasanka19 - stock.adobe.com, panya7 - stock.adobe.com
