Contact Dermatitis/Immune Skin Responses TMS?

So. My “thing” that I have always identified my… well, identity with has been pelvic symptoms. I was diagnosed with pudendal neuralgia, vulvodynia and IC which I have basically 90% healed from thus far. I have some floating symptoms but nothing that stops me from living my life. I’ve been doing pretty well.

HOWEVER, now that my anxieties have calmed down about the things going on with my pelvis, I’m beginning to notice *other* things that are there that didn’t used to be. lol. Like for instance, I am suddenly “allergic” to the adhesive in bandaids, tapes and medical tape of any kind. Never in my life have I ever been allergic to anything. I have been fortunate enough to not have a food allergy or sensitive skin but now, I suddenly get allergic contact dermatitis (or chemical contact dermatitis, I don’t really know and I don’t want to pay too much attention to what variety of dermatitis it is) from anything that has an adhesive on it. I think I first noticed this sensitivity not long after my pelvic pain started (and yes, I was an emotional, terrified mess because I had no idea what was happening to me and doctors kept making it worse by telling me this was going to be the rest of my life now) but I didn’t think much of it because my mind was elsewhere.
It’s occurring to me now that this new allergy could also be a TMS thing but I don’t know. It feels so random. lol. My TMS symptoms have always been things like tension migraines whenever I am under stress (been happening since I was a teen; I “caught” these from my mom who also struggles with migraine since I was a child but through somatic tracking they go away pretty quickly when they come on), random knee pain, itchy ears, itchy shins, random nerve pains on my extremities, and so on. The new “adhesive allergy” throws me though. And I can actually trace it back to when it began which was literally like two months after the pelvic pain started, I would react to medical tape when I’d rush to the emergency room hoping anyone could figure out what I was in so much pain in my pelvic region. I thought it was weird but I didn’t think much of it.

I got a tattoo over this past weekend and my artist placed medical tape over it and when I peeled it off yesterday, my skin looks angry and red in the shape of the medical tape. I was wondering what any of your thoughts might be? Could newly sensitive skin be a mind body issue as well? I rarely see anyone bring up contact dermatitis in TMS forums and I’m curious to know what your thoughts, experiences or theories may be! I’m not scared of this new development, just to clarify. I’m more like “huh, that’s new and random”. Haha. I have read Skin Deep but I don’t remember if the author mentions contact dermatitis possibly being the manifestation of an overly sensitive nervous system that lowers the immune response… but I believe it could be a thing.

 

Hello Marie, yes, contact dermatitis is a TMS equivalent. Psoriasis, allergies, food intolerance, pretty much everything immune related. Research science shows that the brain has a representation of every part of the body as it relates to immune functioning. There are memories of the immune system. The immune response can be conditioned, like pain. It is activated through... The autonomic nervous system. Of course the researchers are careful never to mention that a thing like an emotion or a thought could be involved in the process, so the reasons why it happens are my "speculation."

The brain can actually detect substances very quickly, and makes the decision whether or not to produce an inflammatory response that can be exaggerated in severity or entirely unnecessary. The brain does this for the same reasons that it makes a decision to produce pain or not.

When someone told you that was going to be the rest of your life, that was a nocebo.

 

Can you please elaborate on, "the immune response can be conditioned, like pain"? I found this post because I have been dealing with a Demodex mite overgrowth (rosacea) for the past several years. I have been treating it and can't seem to completely beat it, i.e. kill the mites 100%. I have been working with a TMS therapist the past 5 months who has been a God send and she thinks that somehow my body could be keeping these mites around, or creating the condition for them to remain even though I am using topicals to kill the mites because I am fixated on my skin. My husband thinks the same. I just don't believe how that could be possible, curious based on your response to the above if you had any insight

 

hello Alexandra, I stopped posting on the forum because it was becoming my TMS, another fixation, and because it was ultimately futile. Each person must discover it for themself. However, I saw an email notice and wanted to reply since someone asked directly.

I made some earlier posts about the brain's control of immunity as it pertains to colitis and peritonitis (two serious inflammatory conditions). If you're looking for detailed research papers you can start with this author, Asya Rolls:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=rolls%2Ba&sort=date (rolls+a - Search Results - PubMed)

References 1, 2, 7, 10 and 12 especially. Also re-read Healing Back Pain, the Mind and Body chapter, The Mind and the Immune System section. Personally, I have come to know that a large group of primarily immunological symptoms - the common cold is a great paradigm - are due to brief overreactions of the immune system to similar/periodically repeated psychological stimuli. Each said stimulus, whatever that may be, loads up inner tension, which must be released one way or another. A cold, a flu, an allergy and its repeated exacerbations, all begin in the brain, which activates an immune response pattern. The periphery of the body tissues participate but the brain starts it and keeps the response going for however long. You could think of these common things I mentioned like mini-autoimmune reactions. Think about every cold you've ever had, flu, every instance of gastroenteritis or what you thought was food poisoning. Were they random occurrences or was there a pattern to when they happened? As another example, Georg Groddeck noted that he got scarlet fever typically when he had problems with monetary debts. For all of these conditions associated with organisms or substances, our human immune system is perfectly capable of eliminating, putting them into harmless equilibrium, or ignoring them altogether, all without producing any noticeable symptom.

About your demodex mites, I don't know much about that, but the principle would be the same. I know that those creatures colonize essentially every human, with a couple million of them per person. They're harmless. To "kill the mites 100%" wouldn't be possible anymore than it would be to kill every bacterium in a person's gastrointestinal tract. The more we look, the more we find that our bodies are made up of our own cells together with billions or trillions of bacteria, viruses, fungi, as well as multicellular organisms like demodex (only millions of those big ones!). The whole concept of demodex as a pathogen, a thing outside us that causes a disease/a pathology, is a nocebo.

Anyway, if you haven't already, re-read very carefully that final chapter of HBP, and I'd suggest reading everything Groddeck wrote available in English. They're free on the Internet Archive. Ultimately, the details aren't important or even relevant except as a means of initial discovery and to prove to yourself how health and illness actually functions. Good luck.

 

hi Jan, you're welcome. I'm well as can be...still generating inner tension from time to time.

I hadn't thought about these demodex mites for a long time. I used to see them in skin biopsies (dermatopathology) when I was a resident, 12-14 years ago now. They never did any harm. No one ever mentioned them except to know that they were an incidental, harmless finding. Worrying about how many demodex mites one has, is the upcoming mite count going to be good, oh no! my mite counts are elevated; all that contributes greatly to fear and inner tension you can be sure.

I did a search for demodex. Discounting the dozens of nocebos on most "informational" pages about these innocent little creatures, and the Google AI's fearmongering, I don't think much new has been learned. This is speculation, but I bet they are helpful friends. They probably eat up biological waste products generated excessively as a consequence of inner tension. When their numbers are high, I bet they're doing what they can to help us! If Dr. Sarno were with us, he might say that demodex is a herniated disc of the skin. Once again the broken, dysfunctional system has it ass-backwards, intentionally, so money can be made.

 

Thank you for such a detailed response. I have been reading the references you suggested and found this, " The conditioned immune response (CIR) is a form of Pavlovian conditioning wherein a sensory (for example, taste) stimulus, when paired with an immunomodulatory agent, evokes aversive behavior and an anticipatory immune response after re-experiencing the taste......hese results illuminate a mechanism by which experience shapes interactions between sensory internal representations and the immune system. Moreover, this newly described intrainsular circuit contributes to the preservation of brain-dependent immune homeostasis."

I am interpreting this to mean that because I am "expecting" to breakout and react to my likely normal levels of Demodex mites that my brain is complying by giving me bumps every two weeks like clockwork.

I did at one point have a severe overgrowth confirmed by a dermatologist and had all the clinical evidence of a massive outbreak, bumps, rashes, heat, flushing, burning, etc. All of those symptoms are now gone since I started treating with a potent anti-parasitic and my skin would appear 100% normal to any observer, with the exception of every two weeks nearly on the dot I get a tiny amount of bumps resembling a mini "die off" I experienced when I first started treating the mites. When I first started treating them my entire face was covered in bumps, literally, now it is 3-5 each cheek, every two weeks (their life cycle is approximately two weeks). It defies all logic at this point that I would even still have mites left to kill because I have been treating them for so long. I either still have what would be considered a healthy amount that my brain has been conditioned to react to or I have none and my brain has been conditioned to breakout every two weeks because that is what I expect to happen.

What I am trying wrap my head around is why have all my other mind-body symptoms vanished since meeting with a therapist and "doing the work", mainly feeling my emotions in my body, but these bumps stick around? I admit, I am fixated on them, but I wonder if based on the excerpt I quoted about, this reaction is more about my THOUGHTS versus feeling my feelings. I believe something is wrong with my skin, I believe my skin has developed an allergy to Demodex mites, etc. etc. I have trained my brain to give me bumps by believing I am allergic to something that is part of my skins natural flora. Does that at all sound possible to you?

Again, thank you for your incredibly helpful response!

 

So then once you are in the throes of TMS, it will never fully resolve because there will always be something there to hold your attention? Is the goal to reach a place where you can best tolerate whatever symptoms you have at the moment?

 

I am trying to understand how one differentiates between "pain" symptoms of TMS versus "immune" symptoms in terms of getting over the symptoms. I knew how to think about my pain symptoms, the self-talk etc. and "doing the work" of journaling and feeling my feelings for the first time in life. If my mites/rosacea symptoms are inherently a TMS reaction, stress created a compromised immune system which allowed dysfunction in my skin, I don't know how to think about it, literally. Am I supposed to think positive thoughts and tell my brain even though I see bumps there is nothing wrong? Am I supposed to try to just not care anymore? Or do I try and convince my brain my skin is in fact totally fine and its overreacting to something benign? Argh!!

All of this is just so exhausting to me. I have come so far and truly have been eons better than I ever thought possible, but for some reason my skin has really kept its grip on me. I don't know why I can't let it go.

 

Seems like the best place to start.
Why do you think you can't let it go?
What do you think the rosacea symptoms are trying to protect you from?
What comes up when you feel the feelings around this/journal, etc?
What would it mean to just engage in life with the symptoms?

 

Thank you for this- I didn’t have this understanding before. This makes much more sense especially knowing TMS isn’t just something that happened but more of a protection mechanism.