Medications That Can Help

Our main goal with treating psoriasis is to calm down the inflammation, which leads to the disease.

Treatment strategies for each patient depends on each individual case. It depends on the severity of the disease. Is there arthritis associated with it? Where is the psoriasis? Is it on your scalp? Is it your nails? Is it on your body in other areas? So it really depends on a lot of different factors.

For the skin portion of psoriasis, we tend to start off with milder treatments, and then work our way up. But it also depends on the severity of the disease, when I first see a patient. So we generally will start off with topical medicines, ranging from cortisones to vitamin D creams.

Another safe treatment for psoriasis that I've found to be very helpful is phototherapy. It uses a safe wavelength of ultraviolet lights that we know can calm down inflammation in the skin. So patients tend to do very well combining things like phototherapy with topical medicines, or even oral medications.