Psoriasis has been diagnosed as a disorder for thousands of years in both the east and western worlds. Chinese medicine has always viewed psoriasis as systemic disease that responds very well to the use of internally administered medicinals. Modern western medicine has struggled with it's understanding of psoriasis, in both treatment and diagnosis, and it has only been in the recent past that psoriasis is being viewed as a systemic problem.

A recent article, published in the Medscape Dermatology newsletter and named Psoriasis Is a Systemic Disease: An Expert Interview With Alan Menter, MD, addresses the question of why psoriasis is under treated and under-recognized as a systemic disease? So much modern data now shows that psoriasis is an internally generated disease and that the use of external topical medications are not good enough to treat moderate to severe psoriasis. And yet so many doctors still continue to see psoriasis as an external problem, even though they achieve only limited results.

The article points out that doctors are limited to what they have been exposed to in their residencies. That these doctors will basically practice in a similar way as their teachers. In other words it is a basic game of monkey see monkey do. If their teacher used topicals primarily to treat psoriasis, never achieving good results, then so will the students, expecting the same poor results.

Another reason for the lack of insight into seeing psoriasis as an internal disease is the limited amount of drugs that work well and do not have serious side effects. The two most common internal drug therapies for moderate to severe psoriasis are methotrexate and cyclosporine, both of which cannot be used long term and have very negative side effects.

The article spent a good deal of time discussing the role of a new drug therapy called biologics. The author claims that the main benefit from these drugs has been on helping the medical community see that psoriasis is indeed a systemic disease. This is because of how the biologics work on regulating the immune system. Biologics seem to achieve better results than the above mentioned drugs and they seem to have fewer side effects when taken over a longer period of time.

The problem with biologics is that they have only been used in the United states for the past 5 years as a treatment for psoriasis, so the long term effects of such drug therapies are still very unclear.The way the article presented the use of biologics was written from the view point of a disease that cannot be cured and that the sufferer will have to remain on some type of drug for, perhaps, the rest of their lives.Considering that this article was written in part by an "educational grant" from the pharmaceutical company Centocor, the creator of the new Biologic drugs, one can understand why a life long comitment to a drug therapy would make sense- obviously someones pocket will be greatly filled.

Chinese medicine has effectively treated psoriasis for thousands of years. The emphasis has always been on treating the root problem, often times achieving long term remission or a cure, and seeing that the multiple yearly intake of medicines is not necessary. As I have not collected enough clinical testimonials yet, please take some time to read ones posted in regards to their psoriasis treatment by my teacher, Mazin Al Khafaji.

Trevor