Leucoderma - The Other Side.
NATIONAL JOURNAL HOMOEOPATHY 1993 Mar / Apr VOL II No 2.
Dr Manu Kothari.

Editor: With this issue, we start a new series "THE OTHER SIDE" penned by the mighty and controversial Dr Manu Kothari, professor KEM Hospital and Medical College, author of "The Nature of Cancer and many other books.

"To you , a diagnosis is a word. To your patients, it becomes a sentence". Many a diagnostic label is fraught with the above punishment. Medical men will hate to turn compassionate, to weed out from their lexicon terms that hurt their patients, without in any way helping them.

Leucoderma is one such term. It is ironic that the prefix Leuco is derived from Sanskrit Rucha, Ruchi, Ruchir, meaning bright, shining white, white. But such a bright spot over a dark background, spells for the patients scorn, disdain, ugliness. Medically called Vitiligo, patchy albinism, or piebald skin, leucoderma illustrates mankinds schizophrenia over its love of white skin. It should be white the way mankind wants it, but not the way nature occasionally may. Let us look at if from four different aspects:

1. What is it?
2. What it has been taken to be?
3. What should it be taken as?
4. What is its future?

1. Leucoderma is patchy depigmentation over small or large areas of skin, usually sharply defined, tending to be symmetrical when bilateral, each patch having a scalloped, hyperpigmented border, often enlarging slowly, totally harmless, having no known cause whatsoever, nor any remedy, save some camouflage through some cosmetic cream. It is as old as mankind, as universal as melanin pigment in any skin. It has no hereditary basis, neither inherited nor transmitted. It is patchy graying of skin.
   
   
2. According to medical texts, leucoderma is a skin disorder, precipitated by progressive destruction of skin melanocytes, because of an autoimmune process. Spontaneous repigmentation may partially occur in one third of individuals. The condition is probably inherited as autosomal dominant trait. Moderate success in repigmentation has been obtained in some cases, by the use of psoralens and long-wave ultra-violet light.
   
   
3. If beauty often lies in the eyes of the beholder, so does ugliness. As Desmond Morris has so richly illustrated, the concept of beauty differs from race to race, time to time, ugliness in one community is held as beauty in another and vice-versa. The so called disorder in Leucoderma lies in the eyes of the be-holder, medical or lay. If beauty is skin deep, so is the leucodermal illness.
   
   It is time that the medical men expunged all derogatory epithets from its description of leucoderma, to rename it as a beauty spot, or a beauty patch, whose beauty can be heightened by the sense of dignity with which the bearer of it can carry it around. Many a person carries his or her gray hair with grace without dyeing everyday any, every hour. So it should be with patchy graying of skin called leucoderma.
   
   
4. Leucoderma's total past is its total future. It will be with mankind as long as mankind survives and no medical advancement or treatment will mitigate it, for it is not problem, but a mere variant in natures art of painting different skins. Manking, heal thyself. Restore dignity of being to your Leucoderma fraternity.