Beauty Tips For Body Care
(I want to apologize in advance for not posting photos. I'm paranoid and self-conscious for reasons that have nothing to do with acne, so please bear with my textual description of the crazy good experience I had with this company. I also want to mention that as of right now, PocketDerm is available only in the US and only in certain (most) states.)I'm a 27-year-old male. I've struggled badly with acne for my entire adult (and teenage) life. My acne, untreated, is a pretty severe case, sometimes with lesions numbering in the double digits and always with some of the giant cystic business going on, especially on my neck and jawline. It's nasty, painful stuff.The only times I've experienced clear(er) skin have been under the care of a dermatologist, using various kinds of topical and antibiotic prescriptions, but for the past couple of years I've been uninsured and unable to afford that. Late last year, I was absolutely at the end of my rope dealing with crazy bad breakouts, spent a lot of time on this subreddit in desperation, and saw some people mentioning PocketDerm, a service whereby I could get prescription medication for $20 a month. That sounded amazing, so I signed right up.In my initial sign-up process, I mentioned that I had used doxycycline in the past with good results. My doctor, Nancy Satur, took this into account and gave me a doxycycline prescription along with my topical prescription. (Because of the crazy cost of medications and my lack of insurance, I had to go to a bit of effort to get the doxycycline from the pharmacy without handing over my firstborn child, and Dr. Satur was incredibly helpful in dealing with that situation.) The topical prescription she gave me was 0.018% tretinoin, 1% clindamycin, 8% azelaic acid. I'm going to go through month by month and discuss what I experienced under these medications.December: I started applying my prescription on my lower face and neck, these being my main problem areas. I didn't seem to experience a ton of improvement. Still breaking out like crazy around the mouth and on the neck and jawline.January: some slight improvement, maybe, but it was hard to say for sure. Around this time, I sent Dr. Satur an impatient message and she told me that it hadn't been long enough to find out whether the medication worked for me and to give it a bit longer.February: I had a pretty hardcore breakout around this time, again with lots of cystic stuff all over the neck. After that point, however, I saw a pretty sharp drop in new cystic acne happening. By the end of month 3, I wasn't getting any new cystic stuff on my neck. I'd say this was the first time I felt I was noticeably improving.March: around this time, I had to get off doxycycline because of taking other (unrelated) medications, which absolutely freaked me out because I thought it was the only thing helping me and that my acne would go back to being terrible. It didn't. I've been off doxycycline since then and it doesn't seem to have set me back in any noticeable way.April: My face was noticeably clearer, but I had some acne, including one pretty bad cyst, on my forehead... which was the one place I hadn't been applying my PocketDerm prescription, because it's a comparatively mild problem area for me. I started applying my medication over my entire face rather than just the lower part. I have not had even one instance of cystic acne on my face since then.May-present: My skin is incredibly clear by my standards. No cystic stuff, and anything that does show up is small and goes away quickly. Right now, although I've had a few small pimples in the past couple of weeks, I don't have even one that's not well into the process of disappearing. That's nuts for me—I can't remember the last time my skin was that good, if ever.My acne has been a huge source of anxiety and depression for me, something I thought I'd never escape from, and to have this relief from it is incredible. I'm still paranoid that I'll lapse back into severe acne somehow, but right now my skin shows no evidence of that, and I'm so excited that I feel the need to share this in case someone else with my lousy genes could be helped out by it.In my mind, it's absolutely amazing that they offer this service for only $20 a month (and potentially less via their referral program). If you're interested, go here and pick someone's referral link so that they'll benefit too. Remember to stick with it for a while—if I had given up on it when I first felt like doing so, I'd have cheated myself out of the progress I've made now.
Girls Blog 2015
Submitted by turtlefeasor
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