What helps with eczema?
Last month (15-22 September) was National Eczema Week. This annual campaign aims to raise awareness about eczema – so of course the Rapid Eczema Trials team wanted to do our bit to mark the week and support such an important cause!
We put our heads together and came up with the idea of making a series of short videos called Just One Thing. The idea behind it was to give people in the eczema community a voice and a platform to share their perspectives and advice, and in doing so, help to raise awareness about living with eczema.
We started reaching out across our networks; asking healthcare professionals, people living with eczema and their families, researchers, and other experts to each share just one thing they felt was important about eczema. This could be tips on living well with eczema, learnings from their past experiences, or anything else they wanted to say. Each person then made a short video of less than one minute sharing their one thing.
Once the videos were complete, I shared them on our Facebook and Instagram pages; releasing a few videos on each day of National Eczema week. My colleagues also shared them on other social media platforms. We were hoping for as many people as possible to see them, and also encouraged our followers to share them further and help raise awareness about eczema.
We were initially hoping for a least enough videos to be able to share one a day across our social media platforms for the duration of the week. The response we had was brilliant; everyone we spoke to was keen to get involved and we ended up with an impressive collection of 20 videos!
I think the level of enthusiasm and engagement we saw really highlights what an important and widespread issue eczema is, and how much it affects people’s lives.
The variety of different topics covered in the videos was also a big eye opener for me, personally.
I joined the Rapid Eczema Trials team in May 2024. I’ve been a researcher for almost 10 years now, but before moving into research, I was a community pharmacist. I have very mild eczema myself, but I’ve also worked with many people with severe eczema over the course of my pharmacy career. I’m well aware of how much of an impact eczema can have on people’s lives, and, because it’s such a widespread condition, how often this impact can be overlooked or trivialised.
Watching the videos, I learnt a lot of handy tips from them. For example, did you know that using liquid paraffin spray before and after sports can help with itching, especially for children who don’t have the option to shower at school? I also learnt that people with eczema are likely to have more dust mites in their home than average, because their skin scales have a different fat content which makes them a great food source for the dust mites – fascinating stuff! (Don’t worry though, there’s plenty you can do to keep them at bay.)
As well as including some great tips and advice, the videos provided a really good insight into life with eczema, how treatments for eczema have changed over time, the dangers of misinformation surrounding the condition, and how important eczema research is. I really enjoyed watching all the videos and I would definitely recommend them to anyone who wants to know more about eczema.
Many thanks to everyone who took part in the Just one Thing video series. If you haven’t had a chance to watch the whole series yet, you can find them all on our community pages here.
Written by Lydia Tutt
Research Fellow
Originally published at blogs.nottingham.ac.uk