Hi Steve & Aurelia,

Thanks for the very nice remarks!

Steve, asking about my background is not too personal at all. I
really do not have any medical background at all. I have a a
business background and spent most of my career as an IT consultant.

Best of luck with your degree though Steve. It's an exciting field,
and I believe a very exciting time to be going into it. I'm sure
you'll do well, and I have to admit, I'm a bit jealous. If I were
younger, I might seriously think of a career along these lines.


After several years of really getting nowhere with traditional
treatments for my rosacea and hearing again and again from some really
great dermatologists that nobody knows why some people get rosacea or
why this or that works with rosacea, I started doing some research on
my own, mostly by searching through pubmed articles and googling terms
from the articles when I didn't understand them. Aurelia and David
suggested we put together the RSRP, and in doing the necessary
research, I started seeing some patterns emerging, namely:

1. That rosacea has an chronic inflammatory nature. Remember this
is still just a theory, but one that seems to be gaining acceptance in
the medical community.

2. That the inflammatory pathology of rosacea (i.e. the dilated,
leaky blood vessels and the resulting inflammatory mediators
(cytokines, MMPs, etc) that cause much localized barrier and tissue
destruction and barrier disruption, matches the model of low grade
sepsis, thus indicating to me the involvement of some sort of
gram-negative type bacteria in the bloodstream. Note that this is way
outside mainstream theory on rosacea, as most in the medical community
seem to think that the inflammation associated with rosacea is the
result of some sort of autoimmune or allergic type response.

3. That since the inflammation associated with rosacea is chronic,
any pathogen causing it must also cause a chronic or persistent
infection.

4. That since very little research into the actual pathology behind
rosacea has been done, we should look to the research behind other
diseases of similar pathology (i.e. those diseases that also involve
chronically dilated and leaky blood vessels that cause localized
tissue destruction and barrier disruption). Multiple Sclerosis,
Asthma, Crohn's Disease and Interstitial Cystitis fit this bill
nicely. Again, though, it's apparent and unfortunate that most in
the very compartmentalized medical community don't realize that these
diseases share similar pathologies. Neurologists, Pulmunologists,
Gastroenterologists, Urologists and Dermotologists don't share
research very well.

5. That respiratory pathogen Chlamydia Pneumoniae (Cpn) has been
implicated in all of the above diseases, including even rosacea via a
very small study, and has been shown to infect and persist in many
different organs in the body, including most interestingly the
epithelial cells of the blood vessels, causing much localized
inflammation including dilated and leaky blood vessels and the
resulting tissue destruction and barrier disruption found in the above
diseases. While Cpn has not been shown to cause any of these other
diseases (the nature of medical science makes for very slow acceptance
of cause), more and more research indicates at least a secondary
involvement.

6. That the barrier disruption associated with the above pathogen can
lead to the types of reactions to topicals and other pathogens (like
demodex, the fungi/yeasts of seb derm, etc) that we see with rosacea.
Again, this is way outside mainstream medical thought on rosacea.


Remember too all this is just anecdotal evidence I have put together
myself. I have confirmed my theory with a couple of very helpful
microbiologists who see no fault with my line of reasoning, but it is
far from mainstream medical beliefs about rosacea. And most of all
this is just a theory. It just makes a lot of common sense to me.

Here's where I believe my background in IT helps. In IT, if you have
a "bug" in a system, you quickly go through a process of narrowing
down the possibilities one by one, rather than just trying anything
you can think of to fix the bug. Otherwise you'll spend enormous
amounts of time and effort trying to fix the "bug". And if I were
going to build a new system from scratch, I would first research and
list all requirements for the system, review the requirements and
design a system, then build the system, potentially making a few
assumptions along the way, but always testing these assumptions ASAP
to make sure they are correct before proceeding. Sitting back and
looking at what we know about rosacea (and similar diseases) makes
sense in my mind. Just trialling another topical of unknown action
against rosacea and counting the number of p&p's seems like the long
way to solve the problem.

Most of all, I've learned in my old age that common sense almost
always rules and magic rarely occurs. That I would somehow at the
ripe old age of 35, magically get an autoimmune or allergic type
rosacea out of the blue makes no common sense to me. That it might
be caused by infection, seems much less magical...

Dan

--- In rosacea-support@yahoogroups.com, Aurelia <aurelia.dawn@...> wrote:
>
> Hi Steve,
>
> It is definitely not my place to speak for Dan, but he is an
extremely modest man, so ...
>
> In his role as RSRP Editor, he does almost all of the work on our
Resource Pages single-handed. As one of his occasional helpers, I can
say that we're always impressed by the depth of his knowledge about
biochemistry. In well over a year, I can count his mistakes on the
fingers of one hand and still have plenty of fingers left to stir my
coffee spoon. ;)
>
> Good luck with your degree, Steve. May we ask what you intend to do
with it?
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Aurelia
>