Teresa Alabata
Teresa was a member of our Patient Leadership Council in 2024 and submitted content for us throughout the year.
My story begins in 1989. I was 5 years old and my family was staying with a family friend in LA on our way to Disneyland. We had arrived at the dead of night after driving 6 hours from the Bay Area and the family friend had given me and my mom one of the dogs' blankets to sleep in. It was so dark, we didn't notice at first that the blanket was a flea magnet and a few hours later, my mom and I woke up to the sight and pain of being bitten by what seemed like hundreds of fleas.
The stress of seeing how badly my mom freaked out over the situation plus me being born with a sensitive body system and constitution paved the way for what has become an ongoing life-lesson on how to heal my skin from the rashes and itchiness experienced from various factors such as food allergies, certain fabrics that lead to contact dermatitis, environment, and of course, stress.
In 2004, my godfather passed away and experiencing my first death in the family put my body in a full-body shock in the form of painful, sore, tender oozing and cracked rashes that no longer responded to any concentration or form of steroids. Through a series of miraculous events starting with my determination to find a way out, I found relief through Traditional Chinese Medicinal herbs and using the Elimination Diet to detoxify my system and become the strongest and clearest I've ever been in my life.
27 years after experiencing my first outbreak, I am here, alive and well and virtually rash-free. I will still get patches here and there, but they are small and quickly heal because I've studied my body and patterns so much and so well that I know what I need to heal each type of outbreak as it occurs and without losing my mind.
Having lived with this skin condition for nearly three decades, I have learned to avoid steroidal creams and ointments like the plague, to embrace herbal medicine and green beauty products, the benefits of eating intuitively with a balance of both plant and animal products, and the power of the mind-body connection.
This combination of holistic knowledge has helped me discover my patterns of self-destruction and self-healing. Often, my ideas are quite unorthodox based on what I've experienced after seeing several dermatologists, acupuncturists, herbalists and what I read in my personal research about sensitive skin, health and wellness.
It is my dream and desire to share what I know with sufferers who have become warriors, fighting the good fight and so that they can gain confidence that they too, will find their own way out of the pain. Growing up as a child, teenager, and young adult with eczema, I didn't have access to information, social media, or patient-centric websites on eczema.
AtopicDermatitis.net is a website I would have loved to have had as a resource and online support group back then, and I am happy to be a Contributor to it for current and future people living with eczema to find validation, comfort, and new ideas for ways to cope and heal their eczema. I share more of this knowledge on my website, www.eczemaphoenix.com and my Youtube channel also named Eczema Phoenix.
Click here to read all of Teresa's articles on SocialHealthNetwork.com.