Treatments explained
These pages explain what a treatment is and how it is supervised. They stop deliberately short of telling anyone how to use one: doses, schedules and combinations belong to the person who has examined your skin and knows the rest of your medical history.
Where the line falls, and why
Explaining a mechanism and instructing somebody are different acts, and the distance between them is the whole editorial position of this section. Describing how an ultraviolet filter absorbs radiation tells you something durable about the world. Telling you how much to apply, how often, and to what, is a clinical decision that depends on your skin, your circumstances and everything else you are using.
The second is where a page written by people who cannot see you starts doing harm. So these pages carry no dose, no frequency, no duration and no product name. A treatment page here will tell you what a class of preparation is, what determines how it behaves, and what to ask the person prescribing it.
Why the site of application keeps coming up
Skin thickness varies enormously across the body. The outermost layer is heaviest on palms and soles and thinnest on eyelids, and a preparation absorbed slowly in one place is absorbed readily in another. This is why a treatment is not simply moved from one part of the body to another, and why prescribing considers where something is going as carefully as what it contains.
The base matters for the same reason. Whether something is an ointment, a cream, a lotion or a gel changes how much reaches the skin and how long it stays, so two products with the same active substance at the same concentration are not interchangeable.
Procedures, not only preparations
Several pages here describe things done in a clinic rather than applied at home: taking a sample so it can be examined properly, freezing tissue deliberately, and light delivered at a measured dose under supervision. Each is explained in terms of what it does to skin and why it is arranged the way it is.
Supervision is the recurring theme, and it is not bureaucratic. Assessing suitability, setting a dose, and keeping a record of cumulative exposure across years are the parts that make a treatment a treatment rather than an exposure, which is exactly the difference between medical phototherapy and a commercial sunbed.
The page with no table
One page in this section explains that a classification of topical steroid strength exists, what it is for, and what determines where a preparation sits in it — without reproducing the classification. Naming molecules beside categories reads as a guide to selection whatever caveats surround it, and selecting a treatment is precisely the decision this site refuses to influence.
All treatments explained
How sunscreen works
What ultraviolet filters actually do, the difference between the organic and mineral kinds, why the tested figure and real-world protection differ, and what regulates them.
Light-based treatments explained
What phototherapy is, why medical light treatment is not the same as a sunbed, how lasers differ from it, and why these treatments are delivered under supervision.
Moisturisers and the skin barrier
What the skin barrier is, the three ways a moisturiser can act on it, why the base matters more than the marketing, and what to ask about choosing one.
Topical and systemic: what the words mean
The distinction between treatment applied to the skin and treatment that reaches it through the body, why it shapes every dermatology conversation, and what sits between the two.
Topical steroid strength: why a classification exists
Why topical steroids are grouped by strength, what that grouping is for, why the site of application matters as much as the product, and why no table appears here.
What a skin biopsy involves
Why a sample is taken when looking cannot settle a question, the main techniques, what the appointment is like, and how the result reaches you.
What a skin swab or scraping is for
Why a surface sample is taken, how a swab differs from a scraping, why results take longer than people expect, and what a negative result means.
What cryotherapy is
How freezing is used on skin, why the cold destroys tissue selectively, what the appointment and the healing look like, and why depth is the whole difficulty.
What happens during patch testing
How patch testing is carried out across several appointments, why the readings are delayed, what the practical restrictions are, and how results are interpreted.
What topical retinoids are
What retinoids are derived from, how they act on skin cell behaviour, why they are regulated as they are, and the questions worth asking a prescriber.