Effective control of habitual scratching on atopic dermatitis patients with social stress by using EMDR

This study aim to help refractory AD patients with their chronic skin condition who severely suffer from habitual scratching that may derive from their social stress, by using EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) – a stress-relief treatment used in the field of stress management. A great deal of effort by medical-related people in the world has been made to care those patients, and indeed some significant treatment methods for them have been reported. However, it is also true that there are still quite some patients who are distressed about their condition. We then focus on treatment, by EMDR, of controlling habitual scratching of AD patients that could generally derive from personal friction or social stress. EMDR is said to be an effective method to alleviate the pain of these sorts of patients. We obtained good results in our treatment with EMDR in which the patients came to be able to control and reduce their scratching, and therefore to also enhance their self-efficacy. The SCORAD improved 64.2 to 24.0. The score of SDS, STAI-I, II, psychosomatic scale for AD and skindex29 were changed 75 to 35, 72 to 32, 75 to 33, 44 to 26, 62.9 to 19.0, respectively. These result suggested that EMDR might be useful for control the habitual scratching due to stress from traumatic memory on refractory AD patients.

Conference

English

Eiichiro Ueda
Norito Katoh
Saburo Kishimoto
Kiyofumi Yamanishi

Ueda, E., Katoh, N., Kishimoto, S., & Yamanishi, K. (2009, September). Effective control of habitual scratching on atopic dermatitis patients with social stress by using EMDR. Presentation at the 13th Congress of the European Society for Dermatology and Psychiatry, Venice, Italy