Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Our Pediatrician and Dr. Aron

This is part of a series of posts about Penny's eczema story.  To start at the beginning, go here.

My husband and I had discussed Dr. Richard Aron's treatment a few times, weighing the pros and cons of what to try next for Penny's eczema.  I finally told my husband this was what I wanted to do, but I was nervous about the conversation with our pediatrician.  (Since Dr. Aron is overseas, we had to have a US doctor rewrite the prescription to be accepted at a US pharmacy.)

My husband's advice: "Stop worrying about having the conversation, and just have it."
(He did offer to go with me for moral support, but making that work would have delayed our appointment.)

By now, another family in our metro area had consulted with Dr. Aron, so I felt a little reassurance knowing that if our pediatrician absolutely refused to help us, there was another local doctor I could turn to.  I didn't want to switch pediatricians, especially to someone 45 minutes away, but it bolstered my confidence to know it was possible. 

When I called the ped's office, I told the receptionist that I wanted an appointment to discuss a different treatment for Penny's eczema and gave her Dr. Aron's website: www.draron.com

Then I prepared for our appointment.  Some parents online advised that if our doctor was hesitant, to suggest a trial period of using the cream.

Since I knew that the antibiotic component to Dr. Aron's regime is usually the aspect that troubles some doctors, I printed off several files from the Dr Aron Eczema Treatment Discussion Group on FB where Dr. Aron has written about the reasons for using an antibiotic. 

I also printed off an article that appeared in the Telegraph about Dr. Aron and highlighted this: "With research showing that 90 per cent of patients with eczema have a bacterial infection, Dr Aron says that he is not prescribing antibiotics preventatively, but actively – and that used long-term this knocks out the bacteria."

I printed off the abstract to this study, (found in the files in the FB group) which says, "More than 90% of patients with atopic dermatitis are colonized with Staphylococcus aureus in the lesional skin whereas most healthy individuals do not harbour the pathogen."

I pulled up the case studies of Dr. Aron's patients (link can be found here) on my phone.

In the end, I didn't need any of it. 

Our pediatrician said he had read Dr. Aron's site, he knew we had tried a lot of things to help Penny, and he was willing to work with Dr. Aron.  His only question was how much it would cost us.  (I think he wanted to make sure we weren't getting ripped off.) At $150USD (depending on the exchange rate) for the initial consultation as well as ongoing support, Dr. Aron's fee is very reasonable.  I've spent more than that on just Vanicream

The pediatrician prescribed us Atarax (nicknamed by some "Super Benadryl") to help us get some sleep in the meantime, and I went home to snap pictures of Penny to send to Dr. Aron.

2 comments:

  1. Hope things have improved for Penny, I’m very interested in checking into this for myself.

    ReplyDelete