Treating Infant Eczema

If a pediatrician will pay some attention to eczema he can treat it quite well, and will not often need to send these patients to a dermatologist. Let him first be sure, however, that he is dealing with eczema, and not with some less common skin disease of which he probably knows nothing, such as [...]

It is not necessary to do skin tests on all children with eczema, and some dermatologists think that scratch or intracutaneous tests are of no value for any child with eczema. I do not quite agree with this, and believe that often valuable information may be obtained by scratch and intracutane­ous tests, and also by [...]

No child with eczema should be vaccinated nor should he be exposed to a child who has been recently vaccinated. The virus of cowpox is extraordinarily contagious if the skin is broken, and most of the cases of eczema vaccinatum that I have seen have been acquired from a sibling. Direct contact is not necessary-the [...]

1. Hospitalization.-There are two advantages to hospitalization; these are usually outweighed by the dis­advantages and I hospitalize only a small proportion of my eczema pa­tients. The first advantage is that the patient can be seen every day, and treatment can therefore be fol­lowed more efficiently than if he is seen at longer intervals in the [...]

Classification. In order to treat eczema intelligently, it is first desir­able, if possible, to find out by the history, the appearance and distribu­tion of the lesions, the symptoms, and, possibly by skin tests and other laboratory procedures, what sort of eczema it is, for eczema is an inflam­mation of the skin under which are grouped [...]