If your mother always said: “leaves of three, let it be,” she knew what she was talking about. Direct skin contact with poison ivy is a common cause of allergic contact dermatitis, which manifests as a rash that can be agonizingly itchy and long-lasting. Some essential facts about poison ivy and poison oak rashes: • [...]

As any parent of a child with eczema will tell you, it can be quite a struggle to get the skin condition under control. But Dr. Douglas Leavengood, an allergist based in Biloxi, Mississippi, swears by a simple treatment found readily in the pantry: sea salt. About 20 years ago, Leavengood noticed that many of [...]

Prolonged use of cellphones is leading to numerous nickel reactions of the face and jaw, an allergists’ conference is told. There are solutions.

How this lowly metal drives millions of North Americans into a frenzy of itching. SCRATCH, scratch, scratch. It’s a sticky summer evening and I’m absently rubbing some tiny red bumps under the clasp of my watch. Poison ivy, perhaps? I apply calamine lotion and think no more of it until I notice the same rash [...]

A bit of bleach may be all that’s needed to treat your child’s eczema, according to research from the Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. The recipe? All it took was half a cup of bleach in a tub of water twice a week to see dramatic improvement. The children taking the bleach baths saw [...]