Dr. J and Rob discuss chronic acne and fungal skin issues, emphasizing functional medicine approaches targeting root causes and effective treatments.
💬 Discussion on fungal infections and chronic skin issues.
🦶 Tips for treating foot fungus with topical solutions.
🌿 Importance of natural remedies and dietary changes.
🧪 Role of gut health in skin conditions.
🔄 Multi-therapeutic approach to skin care.
🍼 Advice for managing eczema in infants.
⚖️ Hormonal balance’s impact on acne and skin health.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys, it's Dr. Justin Marchegiani. Welcome to the Beyond Wellness Radio podcast. Feel free and head over to justinhealth. com. We have all of our podcast transcriptions there, as well as video series on different health topics ranging from thyroid to hormones, ketogenic diets, and gluten. While you're there, you can also schedule a consult with myself, Dr.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: J, and or our colleagues and staff to help dive into any pressing health issues you really want to get to the root cause on. Again, if you enjoy the podcast, feel free and share the information with friends or family. Dr. Justin Marchegiani And enjoy the show. And we are live. It's Dr. J in the house with Rob Edwards over at HeritageHealth.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: life. We got Rob here. So we're gonna be chatting about acne and chronic skin issues, fungal, bacterial, and patego. We're gonna dive into the root cause, underlying physiology, how does functional medicine deal with this, and what other deeper issues should we look at when we have these kind of chronic stressors.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Rob, how we doing, man? Welcome back to the podcast.
Rob Edwards: Yeah, thanks. Appreciate it. Good to be here again. And I talked about this this thing, it's funny because we're we see different kinds of patients and clients every single week. And then every once in a while, something happens to us.
Rob Edwards: And so anyway, I was talking to Justin the other day and said, Hey, I got this sent him a picture. So I got this looks like fungus to me on my leg. What does it look like to you? And he said, yeah, I think that's what it is. And so we said let's do one on. on skin and conditions underlying chronic skin conditions that people have.
Rob Edwards: So that's what we're doing today. Dr. Justin
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Marchegiani Absolutely. So when we deal with skin, obviously we can have chronic fungal issues, especially on the feet. Very easily, especially if we're walking around with sandals and we're not really getting those sandals super clean. It's very easy to get fungus on the foot or on the toenails.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You start to see some discolored orange or more yellowy thickening of the nails. That's the. The keratin debris. Essentially, you have these germatophytes, these fungal cells, and they go in and they eat the keratin, which is on the nail protein, and then it spits out this keratin debris that looks yellow and discolored and thicker and maybe more opaque or not as translucent, maybe a little bit, you should say, maybe a little bit more, not quite as transparent, a little bit more like foggy glass kind of thing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And that's the keratin debris from the fungus. And it's really easy, especially when you don't have You know, super clean sandal. Like I got it in Austin really bad because I wear sandals every day. I didn't really get my sandals super clean. I wear special kind of sandals now. I love these guys because they're, they, like from far away, they look bad.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I like the leather, but they're actually hard plastic. And so I like them because I can throw them in the washing machine. Throw them in the washing machine, put some wash soda in there, which is basically baking soda for the washing machine, let it sit for an hour, and that cleans fungus and yeast.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I clean my sandals regularly in the summer, which helps a ton. And one of the best things you can do for topical foot fungus, because I saw pictures of yours, to get that scaly whiteness, especially around the heel, that's a big sign of fungus. And what we'll do is, 8 ounces of white vinegar. And we'll put it in some hot water, just enough to cover your entire foot and that fungal area.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We'll add in a herbal foot fungal soap, which is like tea tree, melaleuca. It'll typically have some Epsom salt, some dead sea salt, but that works phenomenal for cleaning out a lot of that fungal stuff on the skin. And I'll use like a heel exfoliator as well to really get that dead skin off as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Gotta clean that off, debris it all off. And then typically I love this product. It's a tea tree oil of oregano nail kind of polish. And I'll do that on my toes like twice a day. That looks great. And I'll put all the links in a pinned comment. If anyone's listening and they're like, what's he saying?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I'm driving. I can't see the videos. I'll pin some of the products I recommend in a comment. This video is going live now. Give me a day and I'll get it up there for y'all. This is a tea tree oil of oregano product by Purely Northwest. That works really good. I also like carousel foot patches.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: They go on the nail. It works really good. This uses like a glycolic acid in there, glycerin, a tartaric acid is the correct one, and a little EDTA. This works really good on it. You can get it in a liquid form, too. I like it because that acid takes the nail and it starts to make it look more transparent again, like you can see through it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So it helps the nail quality, too. This is carousel. Here's the patch form that I like. And this is really good, too. You can mix in some tarousel, which is a little bit of clotrimazole, which is antifungal, but it also has some tea tree and some silver and some peppermint. These work really good as well. And again, because I deal with patients from all over the world.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: for the last 15 years. I'm always testing products. I'm like, Oh, what works? What is it? I got to figure out what's the best. I'm dealing with patients that have these issues. What are the options? This is another good one here. It's a nail fungal patch. You put it over the nail and this has a tea tree in it as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It has, let's see what else. It says tea tree and it has a couple other things in there, but there's some good herbs in here. I like this because topically, it's nice to put it on you and keep it all day. So these are really great for nighttime. And I'll typically topically apply that on my nails if I have any fungal issues.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: two to three times a day. And I'll typically wear, go barefoot or I'll wear sandals in the morning and let it dry. The key thing is you don't want to put it on and then put your sock on. With foot stuff, a lot of foot stuff, you have to deal with it topically because it's just too far away.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Your feet, especially your nails, they don't get the best circulation and their feet are in a area, especially this time of year in the summer. It's hot. There's a lot of moisture. Fungus loves that. And you need to topically hit that. Whether you get a heel pummel stone or a heel. Exfoliator. You soak your feet for 20 minutes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You use the herbal foot fungal soak. I'll put the link down below in the pinned comment. You use the vinegar, eight ounces, enough hot water to cover your feet. Let your feet soak for 20 minutes. Then your feet come out. You use that exfoliator heel scraper on there, get all the dead skin off. Now your skin's nice and smooth.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then you topically apply that on the nails. And the nails, I typically recommend it morning and night at least. It's great. Dr. Justin Marchegiani. And then if you're really bad, you can also do a patch at night as well. That's a great way to hit the nails. The nails are more unique because of the poor blood flow and just how moist socks are and feet are.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You really have to hit that specifically. But a lot of the drugs that are out there, Lotrimin or the different antifungals that you'll see. They're very hard in the liver, and they can really raise liver enzymes. And gotta be careful with those. If you do go that way, you definitely wanna be on milk thistle, NAC, glutathione.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But doing some of the natural things, I find are a little bit better.
Rob Edwards: Go ahead. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah. No, I think it's great. Some of the general principles, like Justin's saying is, number one, it's the opposite, right? Dark and moist is what fungal fungus like. The opposite, of course, is light and dry.
Rob Edwards: Make sure that you're you know, you have exposures in the summertime to The sun and that your feet are dried out too. Is it like you're saying, you're using some of these topical topical options to be able to put on your skin and scraping it off, getting down as far as you can.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. Feed is interesting. Cause like you said, feet aren't, they don't, there's no easy path of blood flow for it to affect. And so when you have fungus on your feet, it's just a long, longer treatment protocol but it's doable, from a long term perspective. DrMR.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. I've got a couple of things.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hold on. Keep talking. I'll let you riff.
Rob Edwards: Yeah, no. And so anyhow, with the feet mine. So I think my started probably about three or four weeks ago. I knew it was coming. And so started to put in some tea tree oil and some some different kinds of soaps, cause there's other soaps out there that you can use.
Rob Edwards: It's tea tree oil that helps with it. And it started to dissipate a little bit. And then I started using a couple of these other products, Justin's talking about, and and it has has completely disappeared at this point, but I also like to look at different kinds of things in terms of the digestive tract, like what kind of things can we do to support it from that, which is like keeping away from sugars, refined carbs, right?
Rob Edwards: Cause that's the other thing that sort of can create fungal issues or opportunity inside as well as affecting the outside. More anti inflammatory foods, fermented type foods. Those are helpful. And even the other kind of topicals is you can have like other kind of carriers.
Rob Edwards: So there's coconut oil that can carry tree oil. You can also try apple cider vinegar diluted in water. That can be used as a topical treatment that helps to restore the skin's pH. And that also combats fungal infections as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you can do like a wonder bomb, which is a wonderful product by Perea that has a lot of those same essential oils.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You can massage it into the heel or to the foot. This is great for the nails really good. And so what I typically do is here's your foot basis. You can get one of these for eight bucks on Amazon, right? Hot water, up to here. So get a gallon of vinegar, eight ounces poured in, mix it in. Do about two to three tablespoons of this product.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: This has, if you look at it, it's got tea tree, it's got Epsom salts, sodium bicarb baking soda works phenomenal at killing fungus. Also, if you have any kids or you let a shirt go too long, it gets wet and it gets moldy smelling wash soda or sodium bicarb. It's the same thing. You put it in your washing machine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You let it soak for an hour. It'll suck any of the fungal smell out of anything you have. This has bicarb, lavender, chamomile, rosemary, eucalyptus, spearmint, peppermint, MSM, tea tree. So I do about three tablespoons of that. Put it in, let your feet soak. After your feet come out, the skin's nice and soft.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That's where you get this guy. And you just, so this is my heel for instance, you're just going all over the heel, all over the bottom of the foot and it's just getting all that dead skin off of it and it will feel brand new and all that fungus comes off and this allows it to exfoliate and fall off because the vinegar is an amazing exfoliator.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You got the the grating of the cheese there. Yeah, exactly. It looks like it afterwards, but yeah, so it's good. It cleans it all up really nice and then make sure you get some sandals. Like I'll have a. In my corner, I have a thing of diluted white vinegar. And spread your sandals down, give them a wipe off or get some, hydrogen peroxide, wipe off your sandals.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: If you're wearing a lot of those in the summer, get some sandals that are washable because that's going to be a big easy way that you're going to get fungal issues. And then also too, I'll do a 10 percent sulfur soap with tea tree. In the shower, I'll soak that up, get them on there. Sulfur, especially from volcanic ash sulfur, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It's in the scientific literature for the last 100 years. 10 percent sulfur is incredibly antifungal, antilice, antiparasite, bacterial. It works amazing. And sulfur soap with. T Tree is an awesome antifungal as well. But again, it's, you're putting soap on, it's only on for a minute or two. So you really want a good topical or a soak will penetrate deeper into the skin and you'll get a lot more lasting effect.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You want to hit it from a lot of different angles. Yeah. And then if we're looking at the inside in terms of supplementation, you could also use something like superlative acid. I know that's been shown for fungal overgrowth. We've got oregano oil. That's a staple utilizing, and then we got garlic and maybe a little bit of zinc, but all of those are known for antifungal properties that we can use.
Rob Edwards: hitting from the inside out versus the outside in. We can take a multi therapeutic approach to it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah. With your feet, though, it's really easy to still have decent gut health and still have some fungal stuff on the skin just because blood flow is so far away. And if we have stuff on the gut, running an organic acid test and looking at D Rabinose.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Tartaric acid, 3 oxyglutaric. These are different fungal metabolites that we'll see on a organic acid test, are wonderful markers. We can run a GI map and see if we see any candida or fungus on that. And sometimes you miss it on a GI map. It's hard to pick up fungus sometimes. This is why we'll run an organic acid test to see it's there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now, if topically we see it, Whether it's dandruff or subarachnoid dermatitis on the scalp, whether it's tinea versicolor in that white patchy on your skin, whether it's a vaginal yeast infection, or whether it's athlete's foot, whether it's the flakiness on the feet, right? Whether it's the fungal toenail.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: These are all clinical signs that there's fungus and we want to have different approaches. So we have the topical means, we have the soaking, we have some of the different creams that can be helpful, and like you already mentioned, we have different compounds that will give. internally. My line will do the G Eclair 5, which is an oil of oregano.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It's a 75 percent carvacol extract, or partiarchal, which is in the G Eclair 6, or we'll do an undecylenic acid, or like you've already mentioned, caprylic acid, and different acids like that can be wonderful. Tea tree is wonderful as well. There's a lot of good things that we can do to really knock down some of the microbes in the gut.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But just know, if we have a topical infection on the skin, That may not be enough to impact the skin. So you, that's where you need a topical protocol as well as a internal protocol. And we also have to make sure we're not feeding a lot of the microbes as well, because a lot of processed sugar, acellular carbs, processed foods, those are gonna feed a lot of these microbes significantly.
Rob Edwards: Yeah, 100%. That's a big piece of it is the reducing the sugar, refined carbs, those kinds of things. If you have them, they feed the yeast, they feed the fungi. So cutting them out, we'll start to starve the fungus in terms of its ability to grow internally. And then some people just have.
Rob Edwards: They're more prone to fungus fungus infections, both internally and externally. And it depends on how it's showing up for you. But I think in terms of today's conversation, obviously summertime, we're getting out of summertime, more getting into the fall. Now we're going to get into more every time a year.
Rob Edwards: It is my favorite time of year, but I'll also say that then that means a lime and all these other things are going to come back out and those are new conversations to have coming into the fall, but anyhow, and rounding out summer, some people will just deal with fungus. I'll, you walk in the back of a grocery store and you'll see some people that have fungus in and around their feet.
Rob Edwards: And don't even recognize it. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Oh, it's gross. My brother, he had tinea versicolor 15 years and he didn't even know what it is. It almost looks like it's vitiligo where you're losing pigment but you have these white patches. And I got them on the sulfur soap 10 percent with the tea tree.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I got them on this product here, pterosal, and I had them topically hit that. Dr. Justin Marchegiani And I had him, I treated his gut and got his diet clean. And he had 15 year rashes gone. And he had been to a dermatologist before and said, yeah you're not going to be able to get rid of it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You're probably going to have it your whole life. And even dermatology, they, are think it's a lost cause to some degree. Plus a lot of the medications they give for a lot of the topical fungus can be very hard in the liver. And it's tough. It's what do you do? Dr. Justin Marchegiani I am a dermatologist years ago who turned me on to sulfur soap.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: He's yeah, it's been in the dermatological literature for like almost a hundred years. I'm like looking it up. I'm like, why are people talking about this? And yeah, I use a 10 percent and I'll do it with the salicylic acid for acne or for pore exfoliation or I'll do it with the tea tree if I have more fungal bacterial.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So fungal bacterial, do more tea tree, that's just acne or cleaning out your pores and your skin and blemishes. I'll do the sulfur with the salicylic. I'll put the links for all of them below, by the way.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. And I think that Tania versicolor, when you're talking about those white spots on your skin, yeah. We're going to recognize that as fungus. It does look like it's more to your point, like the, like pigmentation changing and that's not what it is. And it's pretty simple to take care of even if you've had it for years and years. And so there's some things that we just deal with and it's, fungus is among us, it's just taking over everything. And we don't even recognize that's what it is.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And when you
Rob Edwards: go put stuff into Google,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: like type in whatever the issue is put like mild, because if you don't get like the worst cases that you could ever imagine of said infection. So you can see here, like you get some of those patches here or it's more common like this, usually you see these kinds of like white patches like that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That's like your common tinea versicolor, especially in places
Rob Edwards: like Florida. A lot of people had it whenever I used to live in Hawaii. Those climates that are that are conducive for it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Thank you. A lot of times you'll see it too, when the skin gets like darker, the, so when you get more of a tan the patchiness will be more apparent.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But for instance, it's going to look at like the Ligo. versus tinea. Let's go look at this.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you can see here, this is what vitiligo is, right? So you can see the difference. That's more melanin melanin, your actual melanin being destroyed versus more of a fungal white patch. So there's a little bit different. Obviously tinea is going to be a much more mild, but it can look similar, like early mild cases of vitiligo.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It's easy to mistake that. So you can see that right there. So I see, you could see, yeah, you could see that there versus that there. It's easy to confuse that, right? Obviously, this is a lot more serious. This is not an immune disease. This could be permanent if you don't do things to fix the immune system and get the Melanin back like narrow range UVB.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You can do topical curcumin creams that can help with this, getting the immune system in the gut fix. But this, you can totally reverse this, doing the right protocols. And this is super common. Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Rob Edwards: where's your, so I only see one screen up. Is there a second one that, Marchegiani Oh, I'm sorry.
Rob Edwards: Thank
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: you. This is the vitiligo screen right here. Dr. Justin Marchegiani So you can see vitiligo right there. A little bit more abrupt. Yeah, a little more abrupt. You have actual autoimmune destruction of melanin. Melanin are the pigment of your skin. You have melanin in the hair as well. And then here's the This is the tinea right here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: This is the fungus. So fungus here, autoimmune here. So you look even right here, people do videos on it. Vitiligo versus tinea. So yeah, it's a common thing, but it's one to make sure we address that. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, I think it's great. Dr. Justin Marchegiani so in general though, Rob, like we talk about these issues.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So we have acne. Let's go into acne a little bit. Or we have, let's say we have fungal rashes around the face as well, or maybe even bacterial issues. We can easily have things there that we can use some of the natural topicals to knock it down, whether it's a sulfur soap 10 percent with tea tree, whether it's a witch hazel based toner.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I love witch hazel based toners. There's some really good ones out there. Thayers makes a good one that's unscented, Hyalogics is the one that I use, it's a little bit more moisturizing. I like that brand. I'll put links for everything in a pinned comment tomorrow, guys, so don't worry about it if you're like, Oh, which products do you use?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And I only recommend things I personally use. So I love those for topical skin issues to clean the pores out, topically treat the pH of the skin. Bye. clean out bacteria, clean out sebum. Again, when we deal with skin issues, it's about 80 20, 20 percent of the time topical. Topical will move the needle 20 percent of the time, all right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 80 percent of the time, 80 percent of the root cause will be in the guts, will be in the hormones, will be in the diet, food allergens, everything. If you're a female, PCOS and excess testosterone due to excess insulin can cause more sebum. Sebum feeds the bacteria on the skin. The bacteria on the skin is called cutie bacterium acnes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That's how the acne term came up. It's the name of the bacteria. And that will eat the sebum and create inflammation and then cause cyst and cause inflammation in those follicle cells. And then, of course, you can have topical bacteria or fungus also grow because of poor diet, because of inflammation, because of gut health impacting the overall bacteria or fungal milieu.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Also, autoimmune issues can impact it. If we go to eczema or psoriasis, so these can be a player as well. Food can play a major role with the immune system, with the gut, can really impact the hormones. If we have a lot of estrogen dominance and a lot of PCOS or more androgens or testosterone that can really feed the sebum and create a lot more acne as well.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. It's that internal 80%, susceptibility versus the topical. And I like the multi therapeutic approach because, we can go, we can come at it from both angles and enhance, our ability to move on to the other side. Yeah. And I think that's really great in particular, like you're talking about leaky gut, right?
Rob Edwards: Leaky gut is a big thing. that we struggle with. If you've got if you've got a leaky gut, you're going to be able to get things to get through into the immune system. What's under the immune system, of course, is your bloodstream. And that can pretty much go anywhere, but where it tends to show up with people, especially if you're teenagers, that's going to show up in your skin, usually in the form of acne or something like that, or it's going to show up in some kind of other hormonal dysregulation.
Rob Edwards: Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. Especially when you're dealing with leaky gut, people talk about it like it's the thing. It's an end result of a lot of things that are upstream. Indigestion, not enough enzymes, acid, or bio, food allergens, dysbiosis, fungal overgrowth, H. pylori, parasites glyphosate exposure, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Glyphosate can easily create gut permeability. Lower vitamin D, lower glutathione can make you more, let's say prone, if you will. And then, of course, chronic stress, that sympathetic nervous system stimulation can lower the stomach acid, lower blood pressure. Lower the acid, lower the motility and make it easier for your gut to become more permeable.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then as your gut becomes more permeable, those tight junctions open up the actin myosin open up different LPS, fungal toxins, casein proteins, gluten proteins to get into the bloodstream and that can aggravate and provoke an immune response. And of course your skin is a means of detoxification. And cool. If you have junk coming out via the skin, then we want our other detoxification organs to be utilized so it's not utilizing the skin, or we want to not dump as many toxins in through either good water, organic food, really making sure we decrease the insulin and the inflammation, so then our skin is not going to be utilized, the liver, the gallbladder, and the kidneys will be enough.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then, of course, if they are gonna be utilized, we want a good protocol where we take the toxins off the skin fast enough so we're not feeding the bacteria with the sebum, with the excess oils. So then, at least, we're mitigating damage. Is it the root cause? No, but it's still doing damage control, and it's allowing those follicles to, to be healthier and be exfoliated, and have good moisture levels, and then we work on cleaning out the hormones, cleaning out the gut, so we actually get to the root cause while we do it.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a good point that, when you, when your body has another choice of detox pathway, it's going to choose detox, no matter what, it's going to go down one pathway or another, traditionally, obviously it's going to go through the liver, it's going to come out your intestine, as you go through your kidneys.
Rob Edwards: But if it's not doing that, then it can be coming out of your skin. And sometimes that's just a sign that, we have over toxification inside of our body. Dr. Justin
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Marchegiani Yeah, and when people talk about skin the dermatologists are going to essentially put it all on, oh, it's this lotion, this potion to fix it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr. Justin Marchegiani That may be 20 percent of the thing. Now, it can make a big difference. It really can. There are some people, go back to the 90s, remember those proactive commercials, right? That stuff could potentially work and could help. There are things that I think are gentler and better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I like my toner. I like Witch Hazel. Works wonderful. And again, not which Hazel the astringent for bug bikes, but an alcohol free, which Hazel, that's very gentle and diluted down. Okay. . I love Theto for soap with the salicylic acid for acne, and I love for moisture control. For moisturizing, one of the best things you can do.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You talk to any plastic surgeon or dermatologist, they'll tell you the best thing you can do to keep your skin looking great. Over time is good. Moisturizing, right good moisture. Now I like using emo oil. Emo oil is wonderful. Most of it's fraudulent. It's cut with soy and canola. So you need one that's AEA certified.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So it goes to a lab and they actually say, yeah, it's the real deal. So I love emu oil. It's cheap, but it works amazing. If you go to a burn hospital and you come in with third degree burns all over your body, they will actually use topical emu on you. It has that kind of an anti inflammatory property. And plus, because if your skin's basically burnt to a crisp, and your body receives that and is not overly sensitive to it, it's an amazing oil because it's very hypoallergenic, too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I love it for those reasons. That's my general protocol. Cleanse, toner, moisturizer. That's a great way to do it. Plus, Emoil has a natural SPF 8, so it gives you about an 85 88 percent SPF UV protective factor, which is nice. You can go out in the skin, in the sun a little bit, get a little exposure, 15 20 minutes, not to worry about it at all.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You go out in the sun, sun's great, you still want to burn. Don't burn down a well said now there's somebody that came in. I saw, we weren't talking about eczema, but there, it looks like grace came in. She asked, she has a three, three month old baby with eczema on the face exclusively breastfeeding.
Rob Edwards: If mom's diet hasn't changed since pre pregnancy, is it possible? The baby is still allergic to dairy gluten in mom's diet.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One, this happened to my second son, Hudson, my wife, paleo template, really clean diet, really clean eating. And she had to go full autoimmune with her diet. And we also had to be very aware of salicylates.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now a baby in that first six months is going to have a leaky gut by nature, right? Their guts are gonna be a lot more permeable, so they may be a lot more sensitive to food. So mama's going to have to do full on AIP. You may have to add in a little bit of probiotics that are made for babies that have infanthus in there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And, you can also have to be aware of salicylates. That could be a thing as well. Now, if you need something, you can ask your dermatologist if, you can get a nice moisturizer, because the problem is when you have eczema, it can also make the skin dry. And then if you, skin's dry, then you itch it, then the itch it makes it worse.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You can get like some nice hypoallergenic moisturizers, like Acetophil for sensitive skin or Avanaply. It's a really good one. Something that's really made for, sensitive people. Because sometimes some of the essential oils can be immune provoking. You want something that's very hypoallergenic.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And there's some medications that you can do to just calm the immune system. They are essentially, you I don't recommend them long term, but they can calm down a flare if there is a flare. The medications for those are Eucrisa or Elodel. And Elodel is either Tacro or Picolimus. Those are the medications for that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But again, I don't love those long term. That's an acute Band Aid. calm down the immune system while you go and fix the underlying issue again I'm in some of these baby eczema groups and it's really sad because every mom and person wants like a topical thing and I'm like My wife was in those groups because we had it for their second kid So I was I wanted to I always want to surveil what the health landscape is and I'm like Start with these foods.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No one wants to change their diet it's just It's mind blowing, right? I come in and I'll write to sell these people into my website. I'm like, pull your foods out. They're like, Oh, no, I just want a potion. I'm like, all right, whatever. First thing is autoimmune. Second thing is salicylates.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Third thing is probiotics, especially with the Infantis. And the fourth thing is going to be get some moisture support on there. Keep that skin nice and moist. And then fifth thing would be adding a medication as a
Rob Edwards: Yeah. And I think just to piggyback off of that, I think it's important.
Rob Edwards: You mentioned that babies have naturally leaky guts and that's important. That's why the mother has to change. It's on the mother. If you're breastfeeding, because they're going to have that happen. So we had a friend of ours and they were having the same kind of issues. They also had some other kind of indigestion type issues with the baby as well.
Rob Edwards: And we were trying to discover what it was that she was eating. And that's where you're going to look first. What's mom eating, right? And for her, it was apple cider vinegar. The apple cider vinegar that she was eating, even though it's good for you for the baby, it was too much. And so it's a little bit of seeing what are these things that are potentially causing or triggering it to happen.
Rob Edwards: But like Justin said, it's dietary dialing that in autoimmune dietary. What was the problem with the baby? Was it the salicylates and the vinegar that was causing it? What was the issue with the vinegar? The vinegar that she was taking actually was that the kind of had a, it was like a mother, the mother.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. It was like a spicy. She was, it was like a, I don't know what it was called. Some fire bomb kind of a thing. So it had some kind of jalapenos and stuff like that. And yeah, there could be some stuff in
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: there. That's really sensitive. Yeah. That makes sense.
Rob Edwards: But it's just, it just comes back down to the idea that even though, the baby's now born, it's still very much reliant.
Rob Edwards: You're its primary food source. And so everything that you're processing is going inside of your baby. So that's just, that's why diet matters. And like Justin says, why it's frustrating whenever they're like, Hey, what kind of topical thing that I can, I put on the baby and it's the baby's still your, it's best medicine.
Rob Edwards: A baby's best medicine is his mom at the younger years.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. 100%. And my wife had to be really strict, but then guess what, like around once we started getting solids on board and he was dialed in there, then we could start to go more paleo ish and that was enough, but she had to be strict for three months.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Pretty hardcore. Yeah. It's good to be aware of that. So in regards to guts so we talked about some of your, Early teen daughters starting to have some acne stuff. That's a common thing. And prostaglandins can be a big driving factor of acne in women. And we'll use certain fatty acids to help modulate some of those prostaglandins.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: A lot of times, progesterone and estrogen balance can be a big deal. And making sure we're not estrogen dominant is key. If we are high estrogen, how are detoxification, how's clodothione in our sulfur methylation pathways? And then and then we may wanna look at progesterone levels too. And then if we need to support prostaglandins, we may use certain fatty acids to modulate those prostaglandins.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We may use evening primrose or black currant seed oil to modulate those.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. Would you go into something as well uh, anything like Vitex or any of those kind of things as well? Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: If someone's a teenage, they're not 18 then we would only be using some chastity and some herbal blends, maybe some maca.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We'd be coming in with higher dose of vitamin A. I always tell my females, if we're giving higher vitamin A, just be careful because they can be tritogenic. It can potentially cause birth defects. Now, that's only if you go very high doses. If you do a topical, or sublingual vitamin A, like a 10, 000 IU per drop.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: If someone's very serious acne, we'll do that because we got to get those cysts down. We don't want to have scarring and that kind of vitamin A can decrease the sebum production from the skin. We want to also do it with the diet. That's prime, but sometimes people have, they're really sensitive and so we may do a higher dose vitamin A.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I call it my natural Accutane, Accutane is a synthetic vitamin A analog. We may do vitamin A drops again, only do it with the practitioner. Anyone in between, I'd rather do higher doses of cod liver oil that has full spectrum vitamin A. That's better. That's not gonna be as teratogenic at all. The vitamin A on the liquid drops, 80 90, 000 I use for a couple of weeks only.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Work with the doctor, okay? Did you get that dialed down? It can be helpful. If not, we're gonna do cod liver oil. We're gonna do higher dose vitamin A via that. We're gonna get some liver in their diet. We're gonna get some egg yolks in. Vitamin A at higher levels can help decrease sebum production from the skin.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Rather do it via the diet, rather do it via skin care protocol, but sometimes that's not enough in sensitive patients, and we don't want patients to scar. So that's where we have these protocols that will pull out. And then I'm also a big fan of these hydrocolloid patches. Hydrocolloid patches, like the Mighty Patch, work great because it prevents people from picking at their skin.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Two, the hydrocolloid pulls a lot of the inflammation out of the cyst so it doesn't erupt and get big, and it decreases the inflammation. It flattens it right out. These are really great band aid protocols. That you can do if you're starting to have a pimple, put a hydrocolloid patch on there like a mighty patch.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That's a great option. Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Rob Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. And I know a lot of people use those and they are effective in that way. Evan Brand
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Work good. The early, I had one coming, I was on vacation last week. I was drinking a little bit more than I normally would. And I had one coming up right here. I felt it, put it on the first night.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Three nights later nothing even came up. So as soon as you feel like I was happening right there, you can't even see it. It was just five days ago. Gone. So I, those patches are wonderful. Or if you get an ingrown hair, excellent. Put right on that patch. It'll pull all the junk out of it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It's great.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. Just a quick little other point to be made that the skin is releases toxins, right? That's the other detox pathway. So drinking a little bit, get a little bit more acne for some people working out, obviously can do that for people as well. But, skin issues are pretty prevalent.
Rob Edwards: A lot of people have them. I think. Kind of takeaway is really multi therapeutic approach both from the inside, looking at your gut, making sure that's running properly. And two, there's some topical remedies, but 80, 20, like Justin said, 80 percent of it, we're going to be looking at inside 20 percent on the outside.
Rob Edwards: But if we're talking about fungal and it's that summertime and the environment's conducive for fungal overgrowth and the feet and in the legs, that's, I don't know if you would flip that on its head and say it's 80, 20, the other way with regards to that. But.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes. The other way. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Because you can fix all the internal stuff, but it may not be enough to hit it topically once you go to your fingernail or to your feet or even to your skin. If it's a chronic tinea, you're going to need to hit it topically. Yep. On both sides. Yeah. Great. Which is different than eczema. That's more autoimmune.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Eczema is more autoimmune. But yeah it's good to be on top of that. Yeah. And again, it's easier when it's just you. When it's the mom going to the baby, it's different because, you only can give, you only can have so many interventions with the baby because they can't take supplements yet outside of maybe some powder probiotics.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr. Justin Marchegiani That's really it. Yeah. I think we hit some good stuff here out of the gate. Take home, work with a functional medicine provider, try some of the simple topical things that I mentioned. I'll put links in a pinned comment. Work with a practitioner, get your hormones looked at, get your estrogen, progesterone, get detoxification pathways looked at.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Look at your gut function. Look at how your hormone levels are at, look at estrogen, progesterone. Look at, if you have any topical things, you have a history of yeast infections, vaginally. You may wanna check chest vaginal pH. You have a history of subarachnidermatitis or dandruff. That's another sign of fungus.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: If we have thrush, that white coated tongue on the mouth, that's a big one. If we have a lot of extra dry skin around our heels, that's a big sign, right? Fungal nails, right? Toe nails, right? That thickened, yellowy discoloration. These are all signs that you need to get to the root of this here or it's only gonna get worse over time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So again. Rob sees patients worldwide here, guys, over at heritagehealth. life, heritagehealth. l i f e. Feel free and reach out to Rob, and then feel free, Justin Health, myself, Dr. J, justinhealth. com. We all see patients, we wanna get to the root cause of this. Hopefully, this information was helpful. If it was, Put a comment down below.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let me know what you liked. Let me know what you're going to start working on. Also, let me know what you want to hear more topics on. Rob and I come into these, pre show. We're like, Hey man, what's happening with patients with you? Oh, this issue. Oh, okay. Let's talk about that. We try to take real life examples of what's happening in our clinics and then bring them to the surface, especially if it's like fresh in our head.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It's let's share it with our people online.
Rob Edwards: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you guys for tuning in again today. And thanks for having me on the show again, Justin, or whatever we call this thing, whenever we're alive.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. A little fireside chat. I like it. I appreciate it, Rob. Appreciate the banter and the back and forth and I appreciate it guys.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: If you enjoy it, thumbs up and love to see your comments. Take care, y'all. Take care. See you guys.