So here's another daily tip from your friendly local dermatologist.
All right, fungal infections.
Now all of us have fungus growing on us, just like all of us have
bacteria and viruses that are on us or in us right now.
Usually our immune system is able to keep them at bay
so we don't even know that we have anything going on.
But I promise you, every single one of you out there
has some bacteria in you, have some viruses in you, and have some funguses in you or on you.
And the best way to keep these things from becoming symptomatic and influencing your life is
to live a healthy lifestyle.
Please watch your diet. Please have mostly a plant-based diet.
Please stay away from the processed foods, please stay away from the fried foods,
please stay away from the sugars and the drinks and all the stuff that we know we shouldn't be consuming.
Please make sure that we are the proper weight. Please make sure we're taking care of the temples that we've been given.
Please make sure you get thirty minutes of exercise a day. Please make sure that you're keeping your mind healthy.
Please make sure that you have goals for your future. Guys, all the stuff that we know we have to have
to stay healthy. It is important to keep all these different infections from coming up.
Now if you tend to get a lot of fungal infections, you really need to see your local dermatologist
to make sure nothing else is going on, that you're not
immunosuppressed in some other way. So once you've been diagnosed as having a fungal infection,
your dermatologist is probably going to recommend a product. Some of those might be prescription. Some of them might be non-prescription.
But regardless of what you are given or told to get at the store,
you need to treat these fungal infections for about six weeks,
because fungus takes a long time to grow and takes a long time to kill. And the biggest mistake that I see happening is
that people
will put the antifungal on the area for a week or two, and then it will look like it's gone,
and so they stop using it, and then a month later the fungus is right back, and the cycle never ends.
So guys, please for six weeks
use the antifungal.
Because fungus takes a long time to grow, takes a long time to kill, and if you want to break the cycle,
that's what's needed. Now the next is prevention.
Now prevention
all lies on that healthy lifestyle, the healthy diet, but it also lies in
good bathing practices. I see a lot of people who get jock itch over and over and over again,
and most of them tend to be overweight so that the skin is folding onto the skin and creating a damp moist area,
which is the perfect environment for yeast or molds or fungus to grow.
So lose the weight, get to a healthy lifestyle, so that you don't have the skin on skin.
But all of us, no matter how healthy we are, have skin touching skin, especially in the folds and the buttocks,
and there's not much we can do about that, because that's our anatomy.
But what we can do is make sure that the area is completely dry after bathing.
Some people use a hairdryer, but they don't put any heat on it. So it's just blowing air. So the area is completely dry
before they put their clothes on.
So please do that. Another trick is to take a white
cotton t-shirt and put it in the fold after it's completely dry,
so that the t-shirt kind of absorbs some of the moisture and keeps the area dry.
Another trick is to use something called Zeasorb AF, and that's
over-the-counter and it's not too expensive. And so after you bathe, and after the area is completely dry,
then you put the Zeasorb AF on the area and it'll help keep it dry.
Regardless of what you do, you got to keep these areas dry so that it's not moist and dark,
so that we take away the perfect breeding ground for the yeasts or molds or fungus to grow.
A little bit of prevention is worth
everything.
Now, I mentioned earlier that there are some over-the-counter products to treat this.
One of my favorites is
Lotrimin Ultra. It's over-the-counter. It's a great product.
And if you need to use it, oftentimes, it's gonna cost you less money than getting a prescription.
But for this huge topic of fungal infections, whether that happens in the feet and the groin and the buttocks, under the armpits,
please see your local dermatologist to make sure you have the right diagnosis before anything is treated.