Healthful Hints: It’s normal for skin to peel after inflammation
By Dr. Frank Bures

After explaining a rather common phenomenon to four or five patients in the past few days — including my bride/editor, who had a bit of a rash (complicated medical term) that I could not diagnose brilliantly — I thought it maybe would be useful to put it into print.

The point of discussion is that many different skin diseases cause peeling when they are healing. A quite graphic example, as I was intending to write this, was a patient last week who had painfully swollen palms and soles with deep cracks at the joints. After the swelling went down, her skin peeled off dramatically. But her hands felt usable, and she could walk.
It seems that, as the inflammation, itching and swelling subside, skin has a relatively common and frequent response to turn over much more rapidly than normal, which results in scaling, and peeling off of the older, involved epidermis as a new layer forms. Normal skin turnover time is roughly (no moisturizer needed) six weeks.

Why this happens is as mysterious as the entire magic healing process. But, you must remember that as the previously compromised cuticular covering is being shed, a la reptilian, things are actually improving. Appearing to have a more antique veneer after the inflammatory/eczematous episode may be more comforting if the evil itch, or other symptoms, have taken a powder.

Most of these unrelated skin diseases seem to follow a similar healing process, which finally produces a normal, nonscarring result. In that phase, they look remarkably alike. “It just may be good to know that, no matter how un-“apeeling” your skin becomes, it will return to normal after the inflammation has gone to that big epidermis in the sky.

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