How I Healed from Psoriasis (Part 1)

I suffered from psoriasis from the age of 12. For nearly 12 years I tried all the medicines doctors gave me (including having my mother putting very sticky creams on my head in the evening, sleeping with a towel around my head and washing my hair before going to school). It was tough. It didn’t help, but in fact the problem got worse and spread from my head to all the other parts of my body, and the medicines they gave me had very unpleasant side-effects. I felt desperate, especially because at that age we are very sensitive about our appearance, and I spent very hot summers in long sleeves and turtle neck jumpers.
At the age of 24 I went to see another doctor, who was the director of the dermatological clinic of a large town where I was studying. He told me that it was a degenerative disease and could only get worse. He said that he had no cure and that the only thing he knew that could halt the degenerative process was a near-starvation diet for the rest of my life: if in 20 years time I had the same amount of psoriasis without it having got any worse, then I could consider his “therapy” successful. I remember that when I left his office I wished to jump under the first bus in the street.
But I didn’t and I refused to believe him and his colleagues. I started seeing a Chinese doctor who did acupuncture: it started to improve, but very slowly. In the meantime I had completed my master degree and having started to work, I decided that I could support myself and moved away from what I thought was the psychological cause behind my disease. I actually moved more than 400 km away (just to be on the safe side!) and changed my life entirely. I believe that this step was essential for my healing. However, removing the cause is often not enough if the imbalance has soaked so far into us as to affect us physically.
By that time my Chinese doctor was too far away for me to visit, however a colleague of mine had a doctor friend who was studying acupuncture. I already knew the acupuncture points and she taught me all I needed to know about how to insert the needles correctly. I improved quite quickly, however every time I did a course, as a side effect I felt very lethargic, which was a problem to me because I was leading a very active life.
Once the psoriasis regressed to a few patches I started feeling “safe” and didn’t bother to complete the acupuncture treatment.
In the early 90s a friend of mine introduced me to Reiki and I had my first attunement. As soon as I had it, I noticed a reduction of the patches. My friend also encouraged me to look into crystal therapy and I bought some crystals to try. Not knowing how to use them (and being very sceptical about them) I mistakenly applied the wrong crystal to a patch of psoriasis and to my great surprise the patch immediately became worse: this reaction meant to me that crystal therapy worked! I started studying this discipline and – at the same time – I attended a course of Channelling. We met twice a month and every time I attended a session, 24 hours later I always noticed a small improvement.
In 1984 I had become vegetarian and I wished to become vegan, but I knew this would have probably meant eating a lot of soya, and doctors told me that soya was the worst possible food for my condition and therefore to be avoided at all costs.
When I moved to England I still had some tiny patches of psoriasis: although they didn’t bother me, I felt that their presence was a reminder that there was still work to do, that I was not healed. In London I gathered much more information about the ill-treatment of farm animals and I decided that I would become vegan, regardless of what might happen to my skin. For the first few months after I became vegan I was very worried that I would experience a sudden explosion of psoriasis, but it didn’t happen. What happened instead was that, after a few months of being vegan, my body adapted to it and even the last, tiny patches disappeared. This happened ten years ago and the psoriasis has never come back. I am nearly 58 now and I am totally free from what doctors told me was a chronic and degenerative disease.
I now run my own private practice of hypnotherapy and other alternative therapies and I help people to free themselves from problems that affect their spirit, mind and body in a very natural way. © Renata Bartoli 2009