We all have this experience. If the layer of fur on the delicious peach skin sticks to our skin, it will make us feel very prickly and itchy; Also, if we stay in a very cold place for a while, our hands and feet will be cold, and when we return to a warm place, our skin will feel itchy; Mosquito bites itch; Gently touching the skin with hairy plants will also itch… Many reasons can lead to itching, which can be attributed to one point. Itching is a special reaction of the skin after being stimulated.
In fact, in addition to local irritation, allergic constitution, frequent eating of spicy and irritating food, excessive mental tension, excitement, impatience, and changes in the living environment can also cause skin itching.
Some diseases, such as chronic renal insufficiency, especially when entering the uremic period, a large amount of urine toxins and other metabolites are retained in the body and cannot be discharged. When they are discharged from the body with sweat, they will stimulate the skin and cause stubborn itching throughout the body; In patients with hepatobiliary diseases, due to bile stasis, the concentration of cholate in the blood increases, and histamine retention causes pruritus on the skin; There are also patients with thyroid diseases, diabetes and other chronic diseases, who may have itchy skin.
scratch out skin allergy
In fact, itching is everywhere. The skin, the largest organ of the human body, may itch at any time for one reason or another. Tickling has become a similar instinctive action of human beings. Look at those babies with eczema in the month of confinement, it seems that they will also wave their small hands and scratch aimlessly.
Tickling can make your skin feel better in a short time, but you will soon find that the more you scratch, the more itchy you will be. Some people may find that their skin has been scratched and scratched, and the itching feeling remains the same, or even worse. We often see such patients in dermatology consulting rooms. At first, they may be a mosquito bitten bag or a small rash of unknown reasons. They are scratched and scratched by the patients themselves. At first, they don’t care and think that scratching will be good. Unexpectedly, the more they are scratched, the more serious they become. Some even break and inflame their local skin, connecting them into patches, and evolving into stubborn skin diseases.
Some people have done an interesting experiment. After continuous stimulation, healthy skin will have itching, burning and other uncomfortable reactions. If the same part is slightly stimulated after one month, 68% of people will immediately feel itching. Medically, this is because after the skin is stimulated, the immune system will make the skin stress to produce histamine and other substances, which will lead to allergic reactions.
scratch the skin out of “memory”
When we scratch our skin regardless of the cost because of itching, hard fingernails are like sharp shovels, hurting our thin and tender skin surface. As we scratched harder, the epidermis was peeled off, the bright red dermis was exposed, and the tiny capillaries of the dermis were ruptured and bleeding, forming scratches on the skin that we could see with our naked eyes. At this time, not only the natural barrier function of the skin disappears, but also the serum protein exuded from the dermal capillaries becomes the culture medium of various microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi. A large number of bacteria attached to the skin cause infection and inflammation. This inflammatory reaction will stimulate the tiny nerve fibers in the dermis, making us feel itchy and painful.
The shed epidermal cells, capillary wall cells, serum and other autologous tissue proteins combine with bacteria to form antigenic substances. After this autoantigen is absorbed into the blood through the dermal capillaries, it will stimulate the body to produce allergic reactions, resulting in red rashes and aggravating skin itching, which is called “autoallergic reactions” in medicine. Thus, the skin will firmly “remember” this “itchy” feeling, and skin diseases will affect the body.
cooling makes skin “amnesia”
So, what should we do when our skin itches? First of all, for those itchy skin caused by diseases, we should actively treat the primary disease to prevent or reduce the damage of toxins through the skin. Scratch the itchy skin caused by external stimuli for a few times. If the itchy feeling disappears, don’t pay too much attention to it, but don’t scratch it endlessly. The correct method is symptomatic treatment to eliminate the itchy feeling of scratching the heart and liver as soon as possible.
At present, a more reasonable antipruritic method is not only to apply antipruritic drugs targeted, but also to reduce the skin temperature and paralyze the itch sensation of the cerebral cortex with the cold sensation of the skin. Ice compress can reduce the skin’s “memory” of stimulation, especially when different humidity and temperature cause strong stimulation to the skin, for example, our skin is red and itchy when baked by the sun, red and itchy when blown by the wind, etc. ice compress is used to alleviate the itching feeling caused by stimulation. In a low temperature environment, the skin’s “memory system” will temporarily reduce its activity, become less sensitive to the external environment, and the itch will not be so strong.
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