A Guide to Using Light Therapy for Psoriasis



Phototherapy is the original psoriasis treatment. For as long as people have had the disease, they've treated it with sunlight. Even today, with all the high-tech remedies available, light therapy continues to be one of the most effective treatments for psoriasis, an autoimmune disorder that causes skin cells to grow too rapidly, resulting in red, itchy lesions on the surface of the skin.When ultraviolet light hits skin, it does all kinds of things,” says Steven Feldman, MD, PhD, a professor of dermatology at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C. Ultraviolet light kills the immune cells in the skin that contribute to psoriasis, and research get more info suggests that UV light may also disrupt the faulty signals between immune cells and skin cells that lead to psoriasis lesions.

With relatively few side effects, phototherapy is an effective—yet underused—treatment, experts say. “Phototherapy is a great treatment to start with,” says Kathy Kavlick, RN, community outreach nurse for the Murdough Family Center for Psoriasis in Cleveland. “Some people get really good results from it.”

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