My wife Mrugakshee and I just finished wrapping gauze around all four limbs of our daughter. This routine of wrapping her eczema with gauze was a once, sometimes twice daily task since June. We wrapped her because it was one of the only ways of keeping her itching under control; “The Contact Method”. This time, we were wrapping her because we’re about to get on a flight to India. We had two legs of the journey ahead of us. One to London, the other to Mumbai. Both flights were more than six hours with a 12 hour layover in London. My wife planned both flights to be overnight flights so we could hopefully keep our daughter asleep for the flights. She’s smart like that. The layover in London was so that we could recover from the first flight and rewrap our little girl. This plan was the best shot we had at keeping her calm and as itch-free as possible for the sake of us and our neighbors on the plane.

It’s November 2025 and we just left our Halifax apartment of 7 years behind us. We had outlived our time in that apartment. Both in terms of our individual growth, but also in terms of our changing needs. A mantra that rings in my head when things feel stuck is what got you here is not going to get you there. Our daughter needed help. Staying in the same place felt like staying “stuck”. It just didn’t seem like it was going to bring about a lasting solution for the challenges that lay ahead.

Nova Scotia sits at the most eastern, land-connected point of Canada and North America. The only thing further east than Nova Scotia, is the island of Newfoundland. Nova Scotia has some of the highest rates in the country for asthma, autoimmune, eczema, and dietary sensitivities. One compelling explanation I’ve heard points to the North American Jet Stream as the culprit. The idea is that the jet stream picks up pollutants from the entire continent of North America, and carries the pollutants eastward. The further east you are, the more pollutants you are likely to find in the air and environment. My subjective experience of being in Nova Scotia echoes this hypothesis. When I arrive back in Nova Scotia after being away, I do find myself more itchy than when I am in other areas of the world. This is just my natural tendency to apply pattern recognition to my experience.

I tell the anecdote about the North American Jet Stream as a way of contextualizing our decision to leave our home of 7 years behind. If you research solutions for eczema online, one of the recommendations you’ll find is “pick up and move”. By no means is that a simple, nor accessible option for most, however it was for us. Even though other places in the world might be more polluted than the one we’re leaving behind, a rationale that seems to make sense is that we’ve developed sensitivities to that environment but not others. The pollen there, but not elsewhere. The pesticides used here, but not there. I honestly do not know the right answer here, but this is the part where I emphasize how important it is to listen to your body. My body has been telling me to leave Nova Scotia for quite some time, and now my daughter’s body was saying the same thing.

The move was bitter sweet. We moved into our 1 bedroom 1 den apartment in Halifax after Mrugakshee (my wife) graduated from Acadia University with her bachelor of computer science. We shared many memories there. I threw my wife’s immigration party in that apartment after she immigrated from India and became a Canadian citizen in March of 2020. We spent COVID in that apartment. Two weeks into the lockdowns, we got married in that apartment. There were five people at our wedding (because of the legal gathering limits for lockdowns). It was my wife and I, both of my parents, and the judge.

We ran a business from that apartment and produced 100 episodes of a podcast together there. We hosted new years parties, dinners, and tea dates. We played countless board games, and relaxed and laughed with many friends during our time there. In 2024, we brought our daughter home to that apartment. Leaving there was emotional, but necessary, and in our opinion essential to the recovery of our daughter. My wife and I mustered up our strength and willpower to change our lives, shut that door behind us, and closed that chapter of our lives. It felt like one of the things that was pushing us out the door was eczema.

Symbolically, moving was us inviting a new paradigm into our life. One where all three of us would be healthy thriving human beings. Practically speaking, we didn’t think that the Canadian healthcare system was going to be able to provide the intense and specialized care that our daughter needed. My own experience with the Canadian healthcare system, coupled with all the reasons why we believe it to be insufficient is covered in detail in Chapter 2.

One of the reasons why we were headed to India, aside from seeing family, was to get immediate access to many opinions of a diverse range of health care professionals. Despite me having extensive experience with dealing with my own case of eczema, I’ve never been confronted with the reality of trying to deal with someone else’s, let alone my own daughter. We were going to need new thoughts, opinions, and techniques.

In the battle to get my eczema under control, I had to develop a relationship with it, and learn novel ways of thinking about it; ways that suited and made sense to me. I’ve had to see and experience my eczema across all the many manifestations it’ll take. At every step of the journey, I’ve taken labels, descriptions, and tidbits from healthcare providers, relatives, friends, blogs, and medical journals. I want to share those labels, techniques, and steps with you in this book. I want to share the many that did work for me, as well as many I’ve tried, but had little to no effect. The point is to keep trying and not get discouraged or demotivated. There is a formula that works for you.

I’ve personally seen and spoken to about twenty to thirty different doctors and healthcare professionals over the years. From allergists and immunologists, to dermatologists, to pulse doctors and homeopaths, to dieticians and energy workers. They all have different, sometimes contradictory things to say about how best to deal with eczema.

Each of them have been useful in their own right, if only to show or tell me what not to do. I am a big proponent of expanding one’s terms and definitions to discover more accurate ways of describing things that by their nature, are hard to pin down. Eczema is one of those things. It’s a volatile condition. It takes many forms.

One day the skin can be clear, blemish free, and normal to the touch. The next day, without any apparent trigger at all, the skin can be red, raised, and warm. In one environment, you can notice it dissipating, where in another, similar but subtly different one, a full blown flare up can manifest. It is an affliction of the skin, but one of the ways in which I’ve come to know eczema is that the cause comes from within. The gut and the mind are the two primary factors that led to flare ups and worsening conditions.

It’s challenging to get a professional opinion on the matter, because the condition of the skin can change rather rapidly. It can present itself in multiple ways, in varying degrees of severity, all within the same day. Depending on who you see, they might call it one thing, and another doctor would call it something else.

We are not equipped with a common language of how to speak about eczema, and the phases that it oscillates through. This is why, in this book, particularly in Chapter 1, I’ve compiled the terms and descriptions you can use with any healthcare provider. You are unlikely to find these terms and labels in a medical textbook. This is how I’ve personally come to know eczema. Every time I’ve visited a healthcare practitioner, may that be a naturopath, a skin specialist, a homeopath, acupuncturist, etc. they all use different terminologies. Some terms and definitions overlap, but most do not. They all seem to see the same thing differently. So you can refer to the pictures and the labels, in order to go to your appointments with a common dialect and dictionary. There ought to be no confusion as to what you’re talking about, as depending on the phase and severity of eczema, the treatment is different.

We might all have similar words and definitions to play with, but figuring out which ones pertain to you is the real trick of the eczema journey. I’ve figured out the things that make me tick, but it feels like we’re starting from zero with regard to my daughter. My hope is that by reading this book, you’re able to get yourself that much closer to understanding your own condition.

After arriving in India in November, things didn’t get any easier on us for helping our daughter. Quite the opposite. Things continued to get worse for the month of December and crescendoed in severity in early January. We have managed to get things under control for her in the months following, but not before significant emotional turmoil had ensued. I desperately want to prevent our circumstances from manifesting in as many people and families as possible. This is the reason why this book exists.

The initial contents of this book was written in the midst of one of the hardest, emotional, confusing, and angry periods of my life. I wrote the bulk of the chapters with my daughter laying in my arms during her afternoon nap; all four limbs covered in gauze. Day after day, I would lay there and weep, craving an emotional outlet for the frenzy and volume of emotions that I hitherto never felt before. It was there on my bed that I decided that my story ought to be told, my knowledge be shared, and our journey with eczema be known and used for the benefit of others.