Helping You Alleviate Shingles (Herpes Zoster) Symptoms.

I decided to create this Blog to help people who suffer from shingles and to share some of the Remedies that helped me in this battle.

		What is shingles? What causes shingles? Shingles (Herpes zoster) is a skin rash caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox. After an individual has chickenpox, this virus lives in the nervous system and is never fully cleared from the body.
Under certain circumstances, such as emotional stress, immune deficiency (from AIDS or chemotherapy), or with cancer, the virus reactivates and causes shingles. Anyone who has ever had chickenpox is at risk for the development of shingles. It has been estimated that up to 1,000,000 cases of shingles occur each year in the U.S. The herpes virus that causes shingles and chickenpox is not the same as the herpes viruses that causes genital herpes (which can be sexually transmitted) or herpes mouth sores.

What are symptoms of shingles? How long does shingles last? Before a rash is visible, the patient may notice several days to a week of burning pain and sensitive skin. Shingles rash starts as small blisters on a red base, with new blisters continuing to form for three to five days. The blisters follow the path of individual nerves that come out of the spinal cord (called a dermatomal pattern) and appear as a band- or belt-like pattern on an area of skin.
The entire path of the affected nerve may be involved, or there may be areas with blisters and areas without blisters. Eventually, the blisters pop, and the area starts to ooze. The affected areas will then crust over and heal. The duration of the outbreak may take three to four weeks from start to finish. On occasion, the pain will be present but the blisters may never appear. This can be a very confusing cause of local pain. Is Shingles Contagious? Yes, Shingles is Contagious. Shingles can be spread from an affected person to children or adults who have not had chickenpox. But instead of developing shingles, these people develop chickenpox. Once they have had chickenpox, people cannot catch shingles (or contract the virus) from someone else.
Once infected, however, people have the potential to develop shingles later in life. Shingles is contagious to people that have not previously had chickenpox, as long as there are new blisters forming and old blisters healing. Similar to chickenpox, the time prior to healing or crusting of the blisters is the contagious stage of shingles. Once all of the blisters are crusted over, the virus can no longer be spread.

I wish you and loved ones good health, happiness and success in overcoming the shingles. Please scroll down to next posts to read more….

Shingles Pain which appears from the outbreak in the initial stage need medical treatment immediately and it is only limited for a certain time period. Comparatively the PHN persist for a longer period and is difficult to heal and are sometimes the pain is quite unbearable.

Study shows that older people tend to experience this unbearable pain more than any other younger people. The pain of PHN sufferers is in fact very agonizing and excruciating and they tend to burn and the sufferers sometimes are incapable to do the daily tasks of normal living.

Shingles Pain Treatment

Doctors today are in constant effort of using various methods to help the patients in reducing the shingles pain. The constant effort brought certain but varying degrees of success. The medication used to treat painful Shingles rashes and blisters infiltrate in the skin and reach the affected nerves. But they are not absorbed extensively into the body bloodstream. Thus medications can be continued for a prolonged periods without causing serious side effects.

A device called transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) can be used to treat patients with PHN. TENS produces low-level electrical current pulses that are very helpful in relieving pain when used to the skin surface. This electrical pulse causes tingling sensations and radiates the stimulation of endorphins production in the skin. Endorphins are natural painkillers of the body.

Doctors further induce an invasive measure that is described as nerve blocks to relieve shingles pain. In this method, local anaesthetic is injected into the area where the nerves are affected. The process is mostly applied to the older patient suffering from PHN who cannot tolerate other medications used to cure the intense pain. Nerve block methods are effective cure to such patients.

Yet another option of providing temporary relief from shingles pain is the Injection of medicines into the spine of the patient. The New England Journal of Medicine published a research done by Japanese clinical study that states that when medicines like steroid methylprednisone combined in certain proportion with the anesthetic lidocaine and injected in spines of the sufferer, it could reduce severe pain of one group by more than 70 percent in comparison to another groups that who was given lidocaine for treating shingles pain.

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