Dermatitis and the Guessing Game

I’ve been suffering from a form of dermatitis for over two years now.  I know that I am allergic to nickel, but the dermatitis is never in a spot where I’ve come into contact with nickel.  What could be causing this?  Conversations with my doctor and a lot of research later, I believe it’s a nickel allergy reaction, brought on by nickel in food that I consume.  So I started a low nickel diet in hopes of alleviating my itchiness.

I just have to say how DIFFICULT it is to pinpoint what may or may not be causing my discomfort.  No amount of charts, graphs, or instructions from doctors can really tell me how much nickel is in every piece of food out there.  There is no magic scale or scanner that I can use to keep a running tally and find my **magic** number.  The Danish say a daily intake of anywhere from 600-5600µg of nickel can cause eczema in nickel senstive patients.^[1]  That’s a large range!  Never in my life have I wished so hard for a Star Trek medical tricorder, so a doctor could just wave a little scanner over me and tell me what that number is for me…

I’ve been following the low-nickel diet for one month now.  The results are promising, but not conclusive. The itchiness tapered off a lot, and I had two whole weeks where I was barely itchy at all!  I had dreams of ridding myself of my dermatitis once and for all!  It was awesome.  It felt good.  Unfortunately, it only lasted two weeks.  This week I am back to full itchiness.  What changed?  I don’t know!  Tracking down all the potential variables is overwhelming.  I was keeping a daily health journal – food, exercise, health, etc – but silly, silly me, once I started feeling better, I neglected to write in my journal every day!  That means I can only guess, based on memory, what may have changed.  This is what I have:

• Over the weekend, I ate out a lot.  It’s impossible to stick to a diet while doing that.
• I had bananas this week.  Bananas are listed on the low-nickel diet as “in moderation”.  Since there is no measurement for “in moderation”, I have no idea if I ate too many.
• I wasn’t home the day the water filter guy was scheduled to come out and change our whole-house water filter.  Presumably, it’s now a week past due and not filtering very well anymore.
• I made pasta for dinner using tri-color rotini, not realizing until after dinner that the green pasta is spinach.  Duh.  Spinach is on the do-not-eat list.
• In general, I was under a lot of stress this past week.
• I had dental work done last week.  I had a root canal and a temporary crown put on.  There shouldn’t be ANY nickel in anything the dentist is using, they wonderfully re-assured me, but I remain respectfully paranoid.

I’m listing all these things, not to bore you to death, but to emphasis how difficult it is to find a single culprit in a slew of possibilities!  For all I know (and most likely), it is a cumulative combination of all of the above items - making it even more difficult to narrow down what NOT to do. 

I'm fortunate enough now to know that I have a nickel allergy.  I can be 99% certain that my dermatitis is being caused by nickel.  This helps to narrow down my clues and suspects, but it still feels impossible to really find anything out.  It still feels like I'm throwing darts blindfolded, hoping to hit something, hoping to land on the answers that I need.  So many other people out there don’t have that benefit.  They’re just blindly guessing, or worse, blindly medicating, hoping to hit a target in the dark that will fix their illness.

I don’t have an answer for this one yet.  Does anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?

[1] Flyvholm, Mari-Ann, Gitte Daslgaard Nielsen and Allan Anderson. "Nickel Content of Food and Estimation of Dietary Intake." Zeitschrift für Lebensmitteluntersuchung und -Forschung A, 1984, Volume 179, Number 6, Pages 427-431.