By Seth Roberts

In November, at Quantified Self Europe, Martha Rotter, who lives in Ireland, gave a talk about how she cured her acne by self-experimentation. She summarizes her talk like this (slides here):

When I moved to Ire­land in 2007, I began to have skin prob­lems. It began gradu­ally and I attrib­uted it to the move, to stress, to late nights drink­ing with developers and cli­ents, to travel, to whatever excuses I could think of. The stress was mul­ti­plied by the anxi­ety of being embar­rassed about how my face looked, but also because my new job in Ire­land involved me being on stage in front of large audi­ences con­stantly, often sev­eral times a week. A year later my skin was per­petu­ally inflamed, red, full of sores and very pain­ful. When one spot would go away, two more would spring up in its place. It was a tough time. I cried a lot.

Frus­trated, I went to see my homet­own der­ma­to­lo­gist while I was home for hol­i­days. He told me that a) this was com­pletely nor­mal and b) there was noth­ing I could do but go on anti­bi­ot­ics for a year (in addi­tion to spend­ing a for­tune on creams and pills). I didn’t believe either of those things.

I was not inter­ested in being on an anti­bi­otic for a year, nor was I inter­ested in Accu­tane (my best friend has had it mul­tiple times and it hasn’t had long term res­ults, plus it can be risky). What I was inter­ested in was fig­ur­ing out why this was hap­pen­ing and chan­ging my life to make it stop. I refused to accept my dermatologist’s insist­ence that what you put in your body has no effect on how you look and feel.

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