I cringe when I look back at my toddler photos back when I was just 2 or 3. In my photos, my face always bled and was covered with scabs, and my skin was blackish and reddish at parts, seemingly inhuman. I suffered from constant rashes all over my body, but mainly focused around my face. I strongly recall the feeling of itchiness from my young years. I had eczema for almost three years.
   

Even though my memories of my early life are faint, I remember putting on sweaters and capes that were always so uncomfortable; I always felt that sheet with tons of little fibers poking me, tauntingly, sitting on my back. In some of my earliest photos, I wore strange gloves that made my hands look like little balls. My grandma made those gloves so I couldn’t scratch myself easily; it seemed that it didn’t work, because my face was bleeding in the picture. I remember furiously trying to take off the gloves, because they slowed me from relieving my itchiness. My gloves were slightly red from blood, and covered in tiny flakes of skin. According to my parents, I wore those gloves for a month or so then stopped because they didn’t really help-I still scratched myself with the wool fibers of the glove.
   

The first attempt to fix this problem, my parents told me, was to take me to the doctor in order to find a solution. The doctors prescribed a white, creamy lotion that was supposed to help with the eczema.  But still, day after day, I’d scratch myself until my legs and face bled, and cry afterwards in pain. We went back to the doctor, but she could not find a solution. The lotion was their only good counter to eczema.
   

My parents were not very trustful of the doctor, so they stopped using the prescribed lotion on me and started to use a different, over the counter lotion. The lotion was an oil-based  clear thick lotion that made your skin look shiny. The lotion reduced the urge to scratch, and when I tried rubbing my skin with my hands the oil protected my skin. My eczema was slightly better, yet it was not improved enough; my skin was still far from normal.
Finally, my parents decided to put me through the type of treatment they received as children; alternative medicine. My parents took me to a place that they knew, a small building in the more inner part of New York, where I lived at the time. My parents carried my to a gray building in the midst of foul air. We went in. The room was neatly organized; everything had its place. The quiet and peaceful room smelled like incense, and there were rows of herbs in the shelves. After shaking hands with the herb-giver and introducing my problem, my parents got down to business. The man listened to their description of my disease, examined me, and thought carefully for what seemed like a long time. After a while, he thought of the perfect herbs to take. We bought them, and went home as my parents put their new plane into action. They rubbed me with the over the counter lotion, and fed me the ground green herbs dissolved in a liquid, and then set me to bed. When they checked on me, I was sweaty and my skin was oozing, but my rashes seemed to be clearing up. The next day, the ooze was gone and my skin had cleared up. Every day, little by little, my urge for scratching would reduce, and there’d be less blood and less crying. In just a few months, I was pretty much completely back to normal.

My parents like to use this story as an example of why they believe in alternative medicine, especially when I express a lack of faith. “Richard,” they’d tell me, “remember the time you got eczema? The herbal medicine worked, while the western medicine didn’t. Now take your medicine before the problem blows up.” When I don’t want to eat weird medicine, they’ll always remind me of this and I’d grudgingly take the medicine.