Sickening Summer: Heat Rash

SUMMER. We crave it throughout the cold winters (especially here in New York), but when it finally arrives, it can be a fair-weather friend.

We’ve all said it once, maybe even a hundred times, when discovering illnesses or conditions in our children.

“Wait, what’s THAT?!”

And doesn’t it surprise us in the summer? Who gets sick in the summer?

Here’s a story that may help your family someday.

Or maybe you’re currently living it.

Meet Nellie.

Nellie’s first baby was two months old, and her in-laws were coming to meet the baby for the first time in just a few days. She was still taking it easy, but she had a few items she needed to pick up at the grocery store before they arrived.

It was July in the Southeast. The high for the day was in the 90s, and the humidity felt like it was at 1,000 percent.

She dressed her baby as lightly as possible and secured her in her car seat.

Twenty minutes later, she’d parked at the store and was crossing items off her list as her baby slept in her stroller.

Nellie arrived home, got the baby inside and unloaded the car. Time to check the baby’s diaper, Nellie lifted the baby out of the car seat carrier and laid her on the changing table.

“WHAT is that?” Nellie gasped, her eyes drawn to a fine, bumpy rash across her baby’s arms and neck.

The rash looked angry and was clearly bothering her little one.

This new mom stifled her immediate urge to call her pediatrician. Confident in her ability to care for her child, she pulled out a medical reference book for infants and leafed through the pages until she got to the section on rashes.

Nellie perused the pictures and descriptions until she found a condition that looked like her baby’s rash.

It was heat rash.

Heat rash, or miliaria, is a condition in which tiny bumps (that can range from pink to clear) form over an area of the body. It’s caused when blocked pores keep sweat from escaping.

Luckily, when Nellie got pregnant, she began studying homeopathy, as she’d heard it could help during pregnancy and childbirth. Now that she had a diagnosis, she turned to her favorite homeopathy reference book, which identified a few choice remedies for heat rash.

Remedies for Heat Rash:

There are a few medicines that should be considered when dealing with heat rash, and each has its own specific set of indicators.

Choose one remedy from the list below and continue with it for a couple of days to determine if your remedy choice is correct. If you note improvement, continue on a schedule of about every 6 to 12 hours until the rash is noticeably better.

1) Your first choice if it’s not clear which one to choose:

Arsenicum album 6X

• Itching and burning with restlessness

• Persistence of complaints during recession of itching

2) When there are hive-like eruptions:

Apis mellifica 30

• Skin feels hot with raised, red shiny eruptions

• Sudden puffing up of the whole body

3) When the symptoms are intense:

Belladonna 30

• Violent sudden outbreak of prickly rash

• Skin red, hot, painful

• Alternate redness and paleness of the skin

4) When the rash is red with raised blotches that sting:

Urtica urens 30

• There is itching and burning

• Skin feels worse from cold bathing

• Skin feels better from rubbing, which looks like nettle rash

Nellie chose Belladonna 30 because the rash was crimson red and hot, hot, hot while her legs were pale.

Since the baby was only two months old, she decided to dilute the hard little pills in an ounce of water and administer it in droplets into her mouth instead of expecting her to negotiate swallowing pills.

She gave her Belladonna 30 at noon and again just around dinner time. By the next morning, the redness was not a screaming red, but she gave Baby another dose at dawn and noon. By dinner on the second day, her skin was nearly clear.

Just in time for her in-laws' arrival.

This was Nellie’s first footstep into the world of self–reliance in treating her newborn.

She made a quiet decision to saturate herself with more homeopathy tools.

That night while she sat with her husband and in-laws holding her baby in her arms, she ran her fingers over the supple skin of her baby’s neck and arms. It was velvety smooth, and it elevated her beyond what she felt before the rash had arrived.

It wasn’t just a mother’s loving touch she experienced.

It was a silent contentment teaming with unprecedented joy and pride that comes from knowing that she had cured her baby.

No drugs.

No side effects.

Inexpensive and, most importantly, curative.