What Causes Eczema Flare-Ups: The Proton Health Skin Score System

Just like a broken car, you can't fix your eczema if you don't know what's causing it. That's why we've created a simple system to track your symptoms and triggers in less than 30 seconds. It's known as the Skin Score method and uses evidence based techniques and advanced machine-learning to automatically understand what's causing your personal and environmental triggers over time.

The Skin Score method is a bit like an eczema credit score: the higher your Skin Score, the better your skin condition. Based on systems that doctors use, the Skin Score allows you to monitor your skin without waiting for a doctor's appointment.

Journaling and The Hawthorne Effect

The benefits of tracking your symptoms go well beyond discovering your triggers. In fact, journalling your symptoms in general have many other benefits including the powerful Hawthorne Effect…

The Hawthorne Effect, discovered by the Hawthorne Works company, shows that being observed improves behaviour and productivity. Imagine that, simply being observed helps to improve the thing that we're observing! This principle has been applied to various industries, including calorie tracking for weight loss. For eczema sufferers, monitoring your Skin Score can lead to improvements in skin condition.

Journaling is highly recommended by doctors and even national eczema guidelines due to its numerous benefits:

• Reduces stress, a factor that contributes to what causes eczema flare-ups

• Strengthens the immune system, helping to fight flare-ups

• Enhances emotional resilience by providing a bigger-picture perspective

By reducing stress and dampening the immune response, journaling can help manage eczema flare-ups.

Discovering Personal and Environmental Triggers

The Proton Health app is designed to help you identify and tackle your Personal triggers. By monitoring your Skin Score each day, the app begins to recognise how your mood, sleep and skincare routine impact your risk of flare-ups. You’ll then receive personalised content to help tackle the most troublesome with real time coaching and advice.

As for the environment, our algorithms automatically detect the area’s temperature, humidity, UV levels and air pollution. We then provide a Threat Score, which indicates the potential environmental impact on your skin. Then, as you continue to use the app, it begins to discover which weather changes impact your skin the most and give you insights on how to minimise their impact.

Irritants and Allergies: Where To Start?

These two categories are a lot more complicated. This is because, as eczema sufferers, we’re prone to Type II Hypersensitivity reactions. This means that we don’t react immediately to our irritants or allergies. Instead, the reaction happens after 48-72 hours. By this time, we have no idea what we came into contact with in the past 24 hours, let alone the past few days.

A common approach is to have an allergy test to discover any food intolerances. Skin prick testing is the most common method. It involves pricking the skin with potential allergens, and an allergy marker (called IgE) is measured. Unfortunately, the marker levels are not always reliable, and it turns out that this is the best we’ve got. Sigh.

But all is not lost because we’ve created a groundbreaking concept; the Switcheroo technique. It’s designed to help you discover any of your irritants or food allergies without having to stop all items at once.

The Switcheroo Technique - A Foolproof Way To Discover What Causes Eczema Flare-Ups

In short, the Switcheroo Technique works by swapping out different products and foods at various times to determine which one is the pesky problem.

Here’s how it's done…

• List all of your possible irritants and food triggers. This gives you a list of all the likely culprits.

• Go ahead and replace one of these with a hypo-allergenic version. These are versions that are specifically designed to avoid irritating your skin. If another version isn’t available or it’s a food item, you can stop eating/using it altogether.

• Continue with the rest of your potential irritants as you usually would.

• Make sure to track your eczema for a minimum of 7 days during the week. Note your symptoms and feelings (you can do this easily within the Proton Health app).

• If you’re using the app, our algorithm will determine if your Skin Score has improved or decreased by avoiding this potential trigger. Otherwise, note down if your skin has improved or worsened.

• If your skin improves, we may well have your culprit. Because by not coming into contact with this trigger, your eczema is better!

• To ensure this is the harmful irritant, retry the potential trigger again and see if your flare-ups return.

• If they do, you’ll have successfully Switcherooed this trigger. You stopped using the product, and your eczema got better, and by retrying it again, it's worse. So you now know to avoid this at all costs.

• On the other hand, if you keep flaring up, this irritant is unlikely to be the baddy. So you'll need to repeat the technique from the beginning with another product.

Don’t forget to track your Skin Score regularly. Over time, the app will begin to learn your personal triggers. Additionally, you’ll find an environmental analysis to protect you from the elements. We’ve also incorporated the Switcheroo Technique, so you’ll do the above on autopilot.

Learn More Here:

Eczema Causes And Triggers | National Eczema Association - https://nationaleczema.org/eczema/causes-and-triggers-of-eczema/

Top Eczema Triggers To Avoid | WebMD - https://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/eczema/ss/slideshow-top-eczema-triggers

Reasons Why Your Eczema Might Be Flaring Up | Healthline - https://www.healthline.com/health/severe-eczema/triggers-how-to-avoid