> I wasn't trying to make any claims about how skin diseases work, I apologise if it came across this way. I just wanted to say that it sounds plausible to me that meditation could help with excemas, since to my knowledge some skin diseases correlate with stress.

> (One interesting anecdote about neurodermatitis is that with all the people I knew it mostly went away at some point in their lives, and they don't know why)

You were informing me about the mechanisms of a disease I lived with for 36 desperate years, as if I was naive, and never read any literature, consulted any experts, and didn't know the basics, like say, that stress is a factor in eczema severity. Try to imagine how that might feel.

But I'm surprised you know of more than one person with neurodermatitis, I can only think of one other. What I had was atopic dermatitis, it was from birth, and never abated.

I read that for most people atopic dermatitis usually disappears around their late 20s, and that milestone came and went for me. Things only got worse. My whole body was covered - unlike for typical neurodermatitis. My dermatologist put me on a course of oral corticosteroids, which didn't really help, and also told me to take lightly bleached baths. The body-wide secondary infection meant my bed was damp from my broken skin leaking out everywhere. My whole body was screaming at me to scratch. I basically never had proper sleep.

I changed everything I could change. I quit my job (so no more exposure to air conditioning drying out my skin everyday, no more stressful deadlines), moved back home to a sunnier climate (low-dose UV is a treatment for eczema, so I'd sun myself every day), had healthy good food that avoided any of the allergens on my RAST tests, and the situation improved... but I still had it across my whole body, I still had no sleep.

The meditation practice of Vipassana solved the problem for me in 10 days... for free. Maybe I could have spent months going to CBT sessions and got the same results from a medically sanctioned clinical methodology... but why, when the better thing is orders of magnitude faster and cheaper? It just so happened the technique is basically not reacting to sensations, which seems perfectly designed psychological intervention for breaking the itch-scratch-itch cycle.

> I have a lot of relatives who are very fond of "alternative medicine", and almost all of it is total bullshit.

The examples you go on to describe are total BS and I agree these should never claim to be a stand in for already-proven medicine, like say taking a RAST test to determine allergies vs measuring skin conductivity. This sort of Gwyneth Paltrow stuff for me seems to be on the fringes and mostly benign, but the sorts of alternative medicines I'm thinking of are more psychological interventions, or maybe last-resort placebos, or even plant medicine outside what has been properly studied. I think there's some scope to bring these into the fold of conventional medicine should they prove their worth.

> You can't just go peddle your cure for everything and then expect some scientist to come along and do the work for you.

Agreed.

> but it definitely does look to me like research is being done on alternative treatments.

You're probably right. Though it took some time before meditation was taken seriously by science, and it's been around for millennia. I'm certain that if my GP said -- in some alternate dimension -- 'I prescribe you a Vipassana meditation retreat', and I took that 'medicine' in my teenage years, I would have been vastly better off. It's bizarre, to be at my peak cognition and physical fitness in my late 30s, because I'm no longer distracted by my whole body screaming at me with the largest organ on my body shredded from head to toe. But how was my doctor to know?