Understand What To Expect From Treatment:
The major goals of rosacea treatment are to:
- Understand the condition
- Identify and avoid the factors that cause flushing for you and that flare your rosacea
- Control the active symptoms and signs of rosacea
- Achieve optimum maintenance of this condition and its complications
- Understand that this is a chronic condition
Self Help:
1) Aggravating factors – These factors can increase your core body temperature:
- Exposure to weather – sun, cold, wind
- Hot food, hot drinks, and alcohol
- Exercise (you should exercise in cool surroundings and avoid dehydration)
- Medications (you should avoid vasodilating drugs, that is, drugs that expand your blood vessels, and topical steroids)
- Cosmetics (you should avoid greasy, drying, or perfumed products)
2) Daily skin care:
- Avoid hot water, loofahs, and rough towels
- Avoid toners, exfoliating agents, and astringents
- Dandruff – Rosacea frequently coexists with sebhorreic dermatitis or dandruff
3) Cosmetics:
Cosmetic cover-up:
- Anti-redness cream, awaits fuller evaluation – Rosacure® is a silymarin extract that claims to reduce the facial redness in rosacea.
4) Patient Support Groups
Medical Treatment:
- For mild rosacea, topical therapy is always the first choice
- When rosacea is more severe, topical therapy must often be combined with oral treatment
- Creams and oral antibiotics are not effective in treating the flushing of the face, or the broken blood vessels