sufferer of boils

1. Guest 7 November 2008 at 20:50PM
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   hi im 18 years old and suffer terribly from boils. ive only recently started having boils over the last few months but ive had about several boils. the first one i ever got was a minor one, at first we thought it was an infection from my tattoo but id had that for ages then the doctor told me it was a boil... after that it just got worse. my boils start from just a small spot with a head, after a day or two its starts to swell slightly and i find it a little painful.. on the fourth day the swelling underneath my skin is extremely uncomfortable and it almost feels like i have a golf ball underneath my skin. by the end of the week the boil will burst and i dont wish to describe what comes out! ive never really found a good cure for boils, the only thing i can take is antibiotics to stop the poison from spreading. please if anyone could get back to me and let me know what a gud cure for a boil is? please please!!

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2. crocks 18 June 2012 at 21:12PM

   I notice this post was posted a few years ago so I hope whoever posted it has solved their problem by now. I am replying though because they describe a situation that I was in a few years ago. I was tearing my hair out with exasperation at GPs complete inability to take my problem seriously. For five years or so I suffered from boils in more places than I care to remember, getting one every few months. It was utterly miserable and I thought I'd have them for the rest of my life. My boyfriend at the time (now my husband) had them first and I think I picked up the bacteria responsible for them, from his skin. The problem was so bad that, even after we got married, I wanted to delay trying for children until we'd been 'boil free' for a year as I couldn't bear the idea of having a baby and passing the boils on to them

   .......SO I went to war against the boils and we have now been boil free for several years (and now have two gorgeous 'boil free' (touch wood) children!) I had to be really insistent with my GP that taking antibiotics to treat a single boil infection was NOT sufficient and that they needed to do something to treat the underlying cause of the infection in the first place. The way I did this was ........

   - using a orange-coloured skin scub called Chlorhexidine Gluconate (which is a skin scrub used before surgery) and showering with it daily.

   - getting rid of all the bars of soap in our house and just using liquid soap or shower gel, as bars of soap can hold a lot of the bacteria that cause boils.

   - I bought a big pile of small hand towels so that I could use a small clean towel each day and then just put them all in a very hot wash at the end of the week to eradicate any bacteria on the towels.

   - I moaned at my GP long enough that they eventually agreed to take swabbed cotton buds from different places all over my body to establish what the bacteria was on my skin that was causing the boils.

   - I also finally got referred to a dermatologist who prescribed something called 'naseptin' which was something my husband and I had to put up our nose several times a day to get rid of any boil-causing bacteria that might be lurking up there.

   My gut feeling was that it was the first three steps that made the most difference (especially the Chlorhexidine Gluconate) but I pushed for the swabs and the dermatology referral as I wanted to make sure.

   It's now 2012 and my last boil was in 2008 - four years ago. I hope that I never have another and I fully empathise with anyone who has recurrent boils...but take heart because you can get rid of them. Don't let your GP fob you off with antibiotic after antibiotic - deal with the underlying cause of the boils and before long they'll be gone for good!

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