While many medical professionals will deal with a patient's eczema problem on a topical basis, from a 'natural treatment' point of view, it is often better to treat the condition on a 'holistic' whole body basis.
Put another way, it is always more effective to deal with a medical condition or problem from the inside out, rather than the other way around, and dealing with eczema is no exception.
There are many foodstuffs that are believed to exacerbate eczema.
It is therefore logical to consider changing your diet to remove any of the foodstuffs that are believed to bring on eczema or to make the condition worse.
Before doing so, it is nevertheless necessary to understand that eczema is a condition which affects everybody differently.
There is no way that you can know for a fact which of these foodstuffs will affect you in a detrimental way personally, because every individual reacts differently to their own diet.
As the saying puts it, 'one man's meat is another man's poison'.
Consequently, there is no way that you can remove any particular type of food from your diet with 100% certainty that doing so will help to alleviate your eczema problem.
Nevertheless, it is generally believed that many of the foods in the following list can make your eczema considerably worse.
What you therefore need to do is experiment, and try removing certain foods from your diet or from the diet of your children if it is they that suffer from eczema.
However, you should remove certain foods from your diet or from that of your family gradually, because if you try to change everything at the same time and you see a marked improvement, you will have little idea of what foodstuffs were previously causing the problem.
While it might be a little frustrating having to be patient while changing your diet, to gain any meaningful results from your 'diet change experiment', you have to change one thing at a time.
This is often referred to as following an elimination diet, where you remove one particular group of foods from your diet and keep that food group out of your diet for a period of least two or three weeks.
During this time, you should keep a detailed diary so that you can record what is happening in terms of eczema flare-ups, and other possible problems.
These are the food groups to work on: Wheat based products: Foods like bread, biscuits and pretzels contain wheat flour which is usually rich in gluten.
As with all of the other foodstuffs in this list, gluten is believed to cause eczema flare-ups, so experiment by removing gluten-based products from your diet for a period of time.
Beverages such is coffee substitutes, beer and root beer may also contain grain as well as yeast, which is another constituent of most bread products as well.
Yeast is a fungus, one that has sometimes been indicated to be a potential cause of eczema.
Try removing yeast based products from your diet to see what difference (if any) doing so makes.
Dairy products: Perhaps the food group that is most commonly associated with causing eczema is the dairy product family, substances like milk (cows, goats or sheep), as well as foods that contain milk such as yoghurt, cheese and ice cream.
It is even suggested that processed foods that contain milk, like chocolate, pastries and soups, should also be avoided because it is so widely accepted that dairy products are often one of the major causes of eczema.