What is Reddit's opinion of Healing Psoriasis: The Natural Alternative?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

You can't stand to hear that someone is sitting here psoriasis-free from a diet of six months. (I stopped itching after two weeks of starting the diet.)

Even a quack is right once in a while. I would argue John O.A. Pagano isn't a quack. But even if he is.....Looks like his quackery worked 100% in my case.

For anyone who wants John O. A. Pagano's book, here it is. Healing Psoriasis.

> The major food that the Pagano diet eliminates is meat.

I have been unable to find my “Healing Psoriasis” book, but I don’t think chicken and fish were limited in it. When you said the diet was “meat free”, I went and checked the diet sheet I posted, and it does indicate chicken and fish are limited to seven servings per week, but I didn’t limit them. I had as many servings as I wanted. (so possibly, through mis-reading, I wasn’t as perfect on the diet as I thought I was.)

> Are there any studies showing nightshades to be bad for psoriasis?

I have not seen any research on nightshades being bad for psoriasis sufferers, nor have I looked. I have just seen anecdotal evidence on the Amazon reviews of the Healing Psoriasis book. However, natural cures are rarely studied in a large way. There is very little money in it.

> There's some overlap between psoriasis and celiac disease,

I had wondered if I had a gluten issue when I was suffering from psoriasis. The diet eliminated it, so I went without any for six months. However, I have been eating gluten once or twice a day for the last six months with no issue.

I also want to add that 77% of the reviewers on Amazon gave the book five stars. This could all be people who are somehow making money off the book, but I doubt it. They appear to be psoriasis sufferers who have been “cured” by information they found in this book. There are some photos.

That is interesting; I had never heard of licorice being bad for psoriasis. I heard that tomatoes were, but kill me now if I can never eat a tomato again. When I mentioned special diets, I actually had this book in mind, which seems to have great reviews on Amazon. I'm still skeptical though. The book seems to advise fairly big lifestyle changes besides just changing one's diet: avoiding certain "toxins" (food, chemicals, pollution, stress) that can aggravate the disorder. I suppose someone who has it very, very severe and is determined enough might try it, but I was mainly interested in the theoretical aspect.

I've seen pills that can be prescribed to suppress one's entire immune system, causing inflammation to be drastically reduced on every plaque on the body. Combined with some very mild exfoliation, I heard it's much more effective than creams for those with full-body psoriasis. But really, imagine if you caught the swine flu or some other virus while taking those pills. I'd be very cautious.

The book, unfortunately, is a big, fat load of pseudoscience.

First, the author is not a dermatologist. He's not even a medical doctor; he's a chiropractic physician ("Doctor of Chiropractic"). That's a red flag right there.

Next, the author starts by defining psoriasis as:

> ... the external manifestation of the body's attempt to "throw off" internal toxins. In other words, to put it more succinctly, the skin is doing what the bowels and the kidneys should be doing. The skin is not ordinarily designed to remove waste matter to any great extent, but, due to the toxic overload produced by a leaky gut, it acts as a backup system and takes on the task of removing toxins ...

Lots more red flags here. There's nothing in the literature even suggesting that psoriasis is caused by "waste matter" being rerouted to the skin. The author also references leaky gut syndrome as the cause, which is pure pseudoscience. The most commonly accepted hypothesis for the cause of psoriasis is that something is missignaling the immune system, causing the skin to think it is under attack, which in turn triggers inflammation, even though the skin itself is healthy. This explains the Koebner phenomenon, for example, where healthy skin suddenly becomes psoriatic when damaged (e.g. when you receive a cut or an abrasion), which a "leaky gut" can't explain. The most recent information points to a mutation in a gene called CARD14 in keratinocyte skin cells, "which associated with increased activity of NF-kappaB, a protein increasing the production of signaling molecules that attract inflammatory cells to the skin, thereby causing the inflammation characteristic of psoriasis."

Further, the author cites the works of Edgar Cayce as the source of his information. Cayce was a classic charlatan who peddled a whole range of snake oil, from healing to the existence of Atlantis, and is often considered the father of the New Age movement; I don't know why a doctor would reference him or think he had the cure for psorasis.

There are also lots of things about toxins, cleansing, misaligned spines, etc. that have no basis in science, or are not relevant to psoriasis.

Just skimming through it, there's just not a lot to the book. Most of it reads like something written by a high-schooler for a book report. There's a lot of vague, weird filler, like an entire chapter on happiness (where he mentions as an aside, in the least camouflaged instance of bragging I've ever seen in a book, that he once met the Dalai Lama), and an entire chapter on how a misaligned spine might impact the immune system, and so maybe go fix your misaligned spine (but if you actually have the condition he's talking about, you'd also be in lots of pain!).

Now, it must be said that the diet changes and whatever else that the author proposes may work; there is some evidence, even if it's scant and under-researched, that there's a link between diet and psoriasis. But not for the reasons he proposes. In fact, he offers almost no explanations for how his "cure" would work. The fact alone that he builds his "cure" on such a shaky theoretical framework makes me not want to trust this guy. At best, he's stumbled over something that alleviates the autoimmune response (the "autoimmune protocol" has some credence, after all, but it didn't originate with the author), and at worst, his credentials as a medical doctor are very much in doubt.

Instead of buying the book, consider just reading the preview on Amazon. His dietary guidelines are on page 109. I think they're basically the same as the autoimmune protocol, so you can skip the book and go to that instead.

Amusingly, one of the top reviewers of the book on Amazon said that the diet cured her, but in her comment she also admits that she was using clobetasol while doing the diet to "kick-start" it. No wonder it worked!

If you want a great book about psoriasis, An Atlas of Psorasis by Lionel Fry is a better choice. Unlike this other book, it was written by a qualified dermatologist, and he doesn't pretend to have a cure. But it's a very thorough look at psoriasis from a medical perspective, with lots of pictures and diagrams. It's expensive, but you can get a used copy for as low as $23.

You're welcome.

https://www.amazon.com/Healing-Psoriasis-John-Pagano-D-C/dp/0470267267

https://www.amazon.com/Healing-Psoriasis-John-Pagano-D-C/dp/0470267267

If you are really serious about healing your psoriasis.

Have you read the Pagano book? His system seems to work very well for a lot of people;

http://www.amazon.com/Healing-Psoriasis-The-Natural-Alternative/dp/0470267267/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343593098&sr=8-1&keywords=pagano+psoriasis