Acne Prevention and Treatment

The Latest Information on Treatment & Prevention of Acne

Acne treatment and prevention has become a real problem nowadays. As it often happens, people are not concerned by a problem unless it occurs in their life in particular.

For instance, a lot of people would not consider taking any precautions to prevent their skin from acne and pimple unless they were troubled by this disease.

That is why the question is about curing acne first, then preventing its return rather than initial prevention.  

Besides, there are so many theories trying to explain the reasons for the appearance of acne that people are really getting confused about what to do and what to avoid doing.

One of the most wide spread theories relates to diet and it pays attention to the fact that it is mainly the people from the western world that suffer from acne while there are some other countries that are not affected by this disease.

The defendants of this theory say that junk food, chocolate and foods high in sugar and fats are the main factor inducing acne. However, the sad truth is that if you were not affected by this type of skin disease, you would not be motivated to change your lifestyle and diet so that it resembles that of the eastern nations.

There used to be people explaining acne with dirt but this is already officially denied. The whole process of the acne and blackhead outbreak is explained with the oil in our body not being metabolized efficiently and dead skin cells becoming sticky and blocking the pores of the skin.

Then the thing that actually causes acne is bacteria which enters into the pores and causes infection and inflammation.

There is no guarantee that if we eat less fatty foods this will be an effective prevention because our body may produce oils in any case. Hygiene might help to control it because thus the bacteria on our skin will be washed away but since pimple is not caused by dirt only hygiene is not enough.

The best solution is to use a combination of methods for effective prevention. When treatment of acne is concerned, zinc gluconate and some antibiotics (doxycycline) which are taken orally, are both effective.

Insulin is also reported to relieve inflammations of the skin but since no big studies have been done on the latter you would better be more careful with it.

In his book called The Acne Prescription Nicholas Perricone recommends a strict diet in which dairy should be totally avoided. This wasn’t proved by any strong scientific evidence until early in 2005 when a paper was published detailing a link between acne, blackheads and milk.

Another thing that Perricone advises is the topical applications of herbal and natural products like alpha lipoic acid.

A very contemporary and at the same time contradictory method is the use of lasers for the prevention of acne. It is very effective in treatment of scars and for killing bacteria on the skin but some researches show that it can burn away the sebaceous gland that produces oil as well as the follicle sac from which the hair grows. So it is not well recommended for acne prevention.