I try to leave my scalp alone but sometimes I just can feel something there and need to scratch 🥲 I know its bloody but I’m really not scratching that hard - it’s psoriasis. not sure if the topical steroid I was prescribed has been doing all that much, but I still have a few weeks until my follow up. Appalled and fascinated by how the scales look
My scalp psoriasis isn’t that severe and my derm even said it doesn’t look too bad, but I’ve been flaring since February and only got properly diagnosed and prescribed mometasone solution earlier this month. I feel like itching varies day to day for me and i always have flakes coming off within 24 hours of washing, sometimes much sooner than that, so I don’t really know what I should be expecting or looking for in terms of progress.
I’ve gone through the wiki and have tried a couple of different descaling methods.
mineral oil - messy and I often work very early so I can’t usually do this overnight; I think it’s only somewhat helpful by itself
T/Sal - I’ve tried leaving it on for up to 10 minutes, but I’ve stopped using it recently because i noticed I was getting a lot of irritation and bumps the day after using it. Also made me shed so much that it became kind of uncomfortable and impractical to go about my day
coal tar 2% (Tarsum) - this is mainly what I’ve been using bc it’s easy to apply before showering and it seems to actually help with the itching/soreness, but I’m not sure how long to leave it on or how often to use it (currently using it about every other day, not sure if I should try more or less often?). I’ve still been dealing with a lot of flakes coming off the next day and overall I’m having trouble gauging my progress/not sure how long it takes to see results.
Even immediately after trying these methods, I can’t really lift scales off with a fine tooth comb the way I’ve seen some people do in videos, so I just comb my hair in the shower the way I usually would.
I’ve been constantly finding huge flakes in my hair for over a week now. For months I felt like I had a thick layer of skin glued to the top of my head, but I still almost find it hard to believe that I could even have this much buildup and not have seen it before?? Like how am I not bald
I have thick, dark wavy/curly hair, so I’m constantly checking for flakes and have to brush my hair out each morning which makes it so big and frizzy. it’s been uncomfortable to wear it up for very long and I’m getting tired of walking around looking like this, so I’d love to know if there’s an end in sight. I can at least tell that the larger plaques on my head are flattening out when I rub my finger over them, but I’d really like to hear anyone else’s experiences with what the first few weeks of treatment looked like for them and how they knew what was helping
I’m trying to better understand what sort of things could be causing or aggravating my psoriasis on my scalp and I was thinking - I’ve always been prone to what I guess is folliculitis, I get them on my scalp and hairline, and also certain parts of my body after shaving (I started to either leave my body hair alone or use a scissors/electric trimmer on clean dry skin). On my scalp they mostly come and go on their own, shampooing daily and avoiding certain hairstyles or brushing my scalp too hard seems to cut down on how often I get them. but I noticed a couple of my plaques originally were red bumps that just never seemed to heal and then started scaling over. Does this sound like koebnerization? Cuz with some of my plaques I don’t remember how or when they started but if folliculitis getting infected or aggravated is a trigger that could be easier for me to mitigate
I’ve been dealing with really persistent scalp problems for a long time and on top of that noticed this red patch on my neck this winter that I assumed was a fungal thing or reaction to some product, but nothing I tried really changed its appearance. It would get fine scales and feel like sandpaper after a couple of days, but was only sometimes mildly itchy. In the before pic it was kinda just starting and it ended up getting a bit larger, darker and more uniform in shape and stayed like that up until the beginning of April; I also had another small patch on the other side of my neck that had some harder scales around the edges but I don’t have any good pics of it. It was definitely mild but kind of annoying and embarrassing to have this big red rash on my neck for 2 months, and my work uniform is black so if I wasn’t obsessive about moisturizing and wiping away scales I’d have little white flakes on my collar 😐
In a follow up appointment with my GP she said it looked a bit like psoriasis and got me a faster derm referral, in the meantime I started looking up what i could do about it with otc products and adjusted my routine from there.
wash in shower with naturium the revealer sulfur body wash
cerave healing ointment 2-3x daily
adapalene gel 0.3% (rx, i use this for my acne but thought it was worth a shot when i saw tazarotene is sometimes used) before bed
i keep some hydrocortisone cream in my work bag but it didn’t make much difference to use all the time, so I just put it on when it was itchy enough to bother me
we had some nice days and i tried to get out in the sun more often but i wear my hair down most of the time so I’m not sure how much uv exposure this area got
By the time I saw a dermatologist on Monday it had already faded in the past 2 weeks to a light peachy tan. She confirmed that i do have mild psoriasis and gave me some mometasone for my neck and scalp, I applied the mometasone cream for the first time last night and now I can barely tell anything was there other than some minor discoloration and it still being a bit itchy lol. I’m thankful that it was this manageable but I wanted to share because I do feel like the adapalene especially was a big help for the scaling and redness, I’m curious if anyone has had a similar experience with retinoids