Trying to make sense out of symptoms

There is a very strong instinct in humans to try to make sense out of what we feel and observe. We try to interpret what we feel by searching our memories for what we have read or experienced. We look for patterns.

The problem is most of us have very little knowledge so we try to blow up the little we know as if it was a balloon. When you blow up a balloon it looks bigger, but there isn’t any more rubber there. When the air leaks out it turns out to just have been a small piece of rubber.

The problem with scabies is you can’t see the mites because they are so tiny.

And you can’t feel them because they produce chemicals to numb our body.

So you have an enemy you can’t see or feel.

The one exception is you might feel a dull pricking when one drills into your skin, but then they simply disappear.

After you catch scabies for the first time you don't feel them for 4-6 weeks.

You can’t feel them because they produce chemicals that numb our body. And you can’t see the mites because they are so tiny.

Let this sink in: for 4-6 weeks the mites are tunneling around under your skin and you cannot feel them at all.

So you have an enemy you can’t see or feel.

As the mites tunnel around under your skin they stay just below a few layers of skin and just above the “meat”. That is their ideal environment. Warm and humid…nice tender new skin.

But as they wander around under your skin they lay eggs and poop and salivate and whatever. We can’t feel any of that at first.

But after about 4 to 6 weeks the body senses all the crap the mites have been leaving behind. Then the body reacts by producing histamines and other chemicals to try to clean out the garbage.

That’s when the itching starts. That’s when the crawling sensations turn on. But it isn’t the mites you are feeling. You are feeling an allergic reaction created by your immune system.

Plus the immune system turns on more strongly in the evening and overnight. Normally your body is resting or sleeping while the immune system is repairing things. But with scabies the immune system is sending out chemicals that cause itching and crawling sensations and making you crazy so you can’t get any decent deep sleep.

This is important so I need to repeat this, your immune system is causing the itching that drives you crazy and makes it hard to sleep deeply. Not getting enough sleep is called sleep deprivation and it gradually drives everyone insane. When I say “insane” I simply means one’s mind becomes less and less reliable. And we can appear crazy to doctors who might decide our disease is imaginary…they might decide the CAUSE of your disease is in your mind. What they don’t realize is your insanity is a SYMPTOM, not a CAUSE.

Plus you have been putting stuff on your skin that makes it react by sending more blood (red skin) and making bumps (hives). And your immune system can send chemicals that feel like there is something live under your skin. Yes, it genuinely feels like mites crawling under your skin, and yes, the feeling is real, but your mind’s interpretation is false. The crawling feeling is just chemicals your body is producing, not actually mites moving.

It’s a grand show your body is putting on and it misleads you into thinking it must be the mites doing it. But it isn’t.

Rarely a few people have a form of scabies called crusted scabies and have hundreds of thousands of mites. Their skin thickens, hardens, and cracks so mites and eggs and such leak out. Those people can start and re-start scabies epidemics.

But the odd thing is very often those people don’t itch at all. They don’t feel any mites. Even with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of mites they don’t feel them at all…because their immune systems are shot so it doesn’t produce allergic symptoms.

That’s how scabies mites have survived for millions of years…because they are sneaky and can hide marvelously.

Here is the life cycle of the scabies mites. First a pregnant female burrows in under your skin. She tunnels around nibbling on the moist skin where your skin touches your “meat”. As she tunnels around she lays 1 or 2 eggs a day. When one hatches it comes up to the skin’s surface and then hides out in pores or cracks. When it is 10 to 14 days old it is mature. They mate and the pregnant female burrows in, starting the whole cycle over again.

This is why you do at least one treatment a week. That way you are whacking them before they manage to mature enough to mate. If you wait 10 days or longer between treatments you have given them time to recover and start a new generation.

This is also why one doesn’t need to be doing treatments every day. It might help kill the mites, but it would beat your skin up too much. Or if you take ivermectin too often it will accumulate and result in an unnecessary overdose.

Ivermectin lasts about 3 days in your body so there is no benefit from taking it more than once or twice a week.

You can easily overdose if you take too much too often. It can build up in your system and you can overdose.

And overdosing won’t kill the mites any better. Enough is enough.

It just turns out treating scabies is a very boring, tedious process.

It can take weeks for all the eggs to hatch and to kill all the hatchlings and adults.

But eventually all the eggs will have hatched and all the adults will be dead and then that will be the end of it.

A few other stray thoughts…

Vinegar won’t help at all.

Bleach won’t help at all.

Vinegar and bleach will just abuse your poor skin more…and you need to be as kind to your skin as possible because it is already under attack by these darned mites.

Seriously…think about it…you are abusing your skin just when it needs you to be nice to it. I realize scabies drives a person nuts, but try to only be nuts, but not to act nuts.

I found Eurax cream helped to heal my beaten-up skin…plus it eases itching and fights scabies.

What are those lumps?

And no, I don’t think any female mites are hiding out for months and then waking up. These mites have no plans. They don’t have “headquarters” or secret bomb shelters. They just go through their life cycles over and over. The adult females live about a month or two. That’s it.

The immune system sends out signals to activate other cells that go around cleaning up like tiny garbage trucks. Then that garbage is dumped into lymph glands…little sacks you might feel as lumps under your skin here or there. Gradually those lumpy glands are emptied but it can take weeks or months.

Thoughts about weekly treatments

Every time you do a weekly treatments you are killing off the new generation of immature surface mites and hopefully managing to hit some of the adult mites under your skin.

And they do get killed by the topical and oral medicines. Not all at once and so one has to apply the medicine more than once.

It is hard to kill the eggs (spinosad, a new treatment claims to kill the eggs). Their shells are pretty darned immune. But sooner or later they hatch and then they can be killed if you are doing the treatments at least once a week.