This is quite a complex problem that I have had zero luck in finding
information on, so desparation has driven me here. I am a white male,
mid-20s.
The problem is that whenever my skin gets damaged in any way, it
cannot heal itself properly. Wounds themselves will heal over at a
normal rate, but the skin afterwards is left with an extremely dark
brown spot where the damage was. To give some examples:
* Wearing sunglasses irritated the skin where the nose pads are. I now
have brown spots / scars on my face there and cannot wear glasses
anymore (in fear of making it worse).
* I went hiking for a day with keys in my pocket. The keys rubbed my
skin through my pants and I now have a brown spot there.
* Slight, superficial scratches that maybe damage only a few outer
layers of skin (ie no blood at all) result in brown scars where the
scratch was.
* Heavy damage from cuts results in VERY dark brown spots.
* I have had a suntan on my legs that is fading very slowly. It's like
the skin cannot regenerate or something.
In all situations, the wound itself heals and there are no bumps or
raised skin as in traditional scars. This is just pigment left on my
skin that does not fade. Most strangely, the severity of the resulting
mark is not uniform. Sometimes the most innocent scratch will produce
a dark spot while a cut on my finger healed with no mark at all. Why,
I cannot say. In all cases, the marks are not fading with time.
This is a problem that has arisen for me in the past year. Before then
I never had any problems remotely like this and I have no family
history of this. Over the same time period I have become a vegetarian
(actually closer to vegan since I don't eat eggs and eat very limited
dairy). I have suspected that this problem was diet related, since
that was the only major change in my life that I can pinpoint. Yet I
now eat far more healthy than I did before I was a vegetarian.
I try to eat as much protein as I can. I eat ground flax almost daily,
and make efforts to get Omega-3 fats from as many vegetarian sources
as I can. I take multivitamins a few times a week. I went to see a
doctor (not a skin specialist though) and he ran a blood test and it
came back clean - perfectly healthy, not lacking iron or anything like
that. He seemed to have no clue about what could be happening. He did
mention that he did NOT think it was keloid, and what I have read
about keloid backs this up (but I won't rule it out if you can provide
alternate evidence).
So, my question:
What is the cause of this problem?
As part of that you may want to touch upon:
What foods / nutrients does the body require to heal and regenerate
the skin properly? What could I be lacking in that could be causing
this specific problem? Are there any reported cases of other people
having this same problem?
Thank you. |
Clarification of Question by
sol9-ga
on
23 Nov 2005 15:15 PST
I'd like to thank you for that link (I should have done a search on
here before posting!). Just knowing that term 'hyperpigmentation'
opens up several research avenues, and post-inflammatory
hyperpigmentation (PID) definitely fits with what is happening.
The thing that I still do not understand is WHY it is happening. I do
not have dark skin, I never used to be prone to this, and nobody in my
family is prone to this. Yet suddenly I have it.
The way I see it, there has to be some underlying cause of this
problem that made my skin change how it heals. If I know that cause, I
can stop it, and I won't have the problem anymore. A lifetime of being
constantly scarred and applying chemicals to erase the scars is not an
appealing solution.
I am going to hold off for now on having this question answered, as I
now have a lot of research I can do on my own into post-inflammatory
hyperpigmentation. Still, I have trouble wrapping my head around the
fact that I somehow 'developed' this problem. The fact that the other
poster is also a vegetarian is troubling to me as well. Anyways, if I
get nowhere, I'll be back. Thanks again.
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