I Was Prescribed Steroid Creams At Age 2. I Used Them For 23 Years.
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I was ten months old the first time something went wrong with my body. I was in my crib, screaming. My skin was covered in rashes and peeling. My mom could not console me. It got so bad that the doctor came to the house to inspect the environment.
They blamed a wool blanket. Said the fibers were causing a reaction. They removed the blanket. The eczema stayed. Which meant it was never the blanket. Something else was happening inside my body that nobody could identify. So they did what doctors are trained to do. They prescribed.
By age two, I was on steroid cream for my eczema and a steroid inhaler for my asthma. Two medications for a body that had not finished growing teeth. And a lifetime of management that was about to begin.
I want to tell you why nothing worked for twenty-six years. My blood was dirty and nobody was cleaning it. Every medication I was given suppressed a symptom while the actual problem, what was moving through my bloodstream, kept getting worse.
I want to walk you through every age, because somewhere in that timeline is the age you are right now. And I want you to see what happened between twenty-eight and thirty, because what happened in those two years is what is available to you no matter how long you have been sick.
The timeline
At five, the medication was just part of life. My mom did what every parent does. She followed the doctor's instructions. The cream when my skin flared. The inhaler when I could not breathe. We trusted the system. The system was not wrong. It was just incomplete. Nobody was looking at my blood. They were treating the surface and the surface kept reacting because the inside kept getting dirtier.
At ten, it was part of my morning. I would apply my eczema cream before school every single day like brushing my teeth. I carried my inhaler with me everywhere. I attended weekly sessions with other sick kids where they educated us on how to use our medication properly. I did not fully understand why I was there. I felt normal. But I could not breathe when I played at recess. I could not run the way the other kids ran. I would start wheezing and have to stop while everyone else kept going.
At twelve, the candida appeared. And the brain fog hit. I started high school and I could not focus on anything. I was falling asleep in class. The words would pass through me like I was not in the room. I was sleeping eleven or twelve hours a night and still exhausted during the day. On weekends, I would wake up, do one task to show I was not lazy, and then go back to sleep.
I was not lazy. My blood was dirty. My gut had been compromised by years of medication, and the waste from that gut was entering my bloodstream and circulating to my brain, my muscles, my skin. My body was spending all its energy fighting what was happening in the blood. But nobody explained that. I just thought something was wrong with me as a person.
At fifteen, the medication was fully in my hands. I started avoiding triggers instinctively. I stopped eating at school entirely. Anytime food was offered, I rejected it. I had subconsciously made the connection between food and bad reactions, so I just stopped eating around other people. I did not call it fasting. I did not have a framework for it. I was just a teenager who had learned that food made her body worse, so she stopped eating when she could.
At eighteen, something shifted. I became vegan. Not for ethical reasons. Because I knew, deep in my bones, that my health issues were connected to what I was putting in my body. That was the moment I decided I was going to figure this out myself. That was the day the search officially started. And it became the only thing I really cared about. When you have been sick your entire life, finding the cure becomes the purpose. Everything else is secondary.
At twenty, I was hiking every day. Trying to be as active as possible despite the asthma. I was deeply dependent on my inhaler, but I started trying to use it less. I switched everything to wood. I slept on the floor. I was experimenting with anything that felt closer to how humans were supposed to live. And I was spending money. Every year, a new diet. A new protocol. A new test. New supplements. High-quality elimination diets. Specialized testing. At one point, I was being evaluated for things that had nothing to do with the body. Nothing fit, because the answer was not psychological. It was physiological. My blood was dirty and nobody had thought to look there.
At twenty-five, I quit a stressful job and got serious. Full-time research. Full-time experimentation. My health became my work.
The bottom
At twenty-eight, the worst flare-up of my life happened. My entire body was covered in eczema. My face was peeling. The skin around my mouth looked like a chemical peel. I could not go outside. I could not look at myself. After twenty-six years of managing this condition, it came back worse than it had ever been, as if every year of suppression had built up in my blood and released at once.
I hit a point where I did not know if I wanted to keep going. That is how bad it was. Twenty-six years of being sick, and this was the bottom.
I want you to stay in that moment with me for a second, because this is the part of my story that nobody talks about, and it is the part I need you to understand most.
When you have managed a condition for decades, you start to believe this is just who you are. You stop noticing the cost. You forget what your skin felt like before. You forget what breathing easily felt like. You forget what your mind felt like when it was clear. You stop expecting anything different because you have spent years being told this is your genetics, your immune system, your sensitivity, your terrain. And every year that goes by, your blood gets a little dirtier, your gut gets a little more compromised, your hormones drift a little further off rhythm, and your body adjusts to a new lower baseline. And you call that baseline normal.
Until one day your body cannot adjust anymore. And that is when the bottom shows up. For me, it was at twenty-eight, with my face peeling and my body unrecognizable. For another woman, it might be a Hashimoto's diagnosis at thirty-five. For another, it is being bedridden at forty-two. For another, it is a child she cannot keep up with because her energy is gone. The bottom looks different for everyone, but every woman who has been sick for years is on a trajectory toward it. The body cannot keep absorbing dirty blood forever. Something gives.
I went all the way to the bottom because nobody told me there was another way. There was no one explaining that the blood was the problem and that everything else, the skin, the lungs, the gut, the brain, the hair, the mood, was downstream of what was moving through it. I had to find that out by spending twenty-six years getting worse and then almost not making it through year twenty-seven.
You do not have to do that. You are reading this. Which means somebody is finally telling you.
And then I found it
Not a product. Not a practitioner. Not a protocol. A mechanism. I understood, for the first time, what was actually happening in my blood and why nothing had ever worked.
Every medication I had ever been given was a mute button. The steroid cream told my skin to stop reacting. The inhaler told my lungs to stop reacting. But the thing causing the reaction was never addressed. The waste in my gut. The bacteria that had been proliferating since the antibiotics destroyed my gut flora. The dirty blood that was carrying toxins to every organ because my intestines were backed up and leaching byproducts into the bloodstream.
Nobody ever looked at my blood at that level. They looked at the symptoms. Skin. Lungs. Focus. Energy. Each one treated separately. Each treatment adding to the load my blood was already carrying. The inhaler led to strep throat because I could not always rinse my mouth after using it during sports. The strep required antibiotics. The antibiotics destroyed my gut bacteria. The destroyed bacteria let candida take over. The candida meant my gut was feeding even dirtier blood into my body, causing the brain fog, the food intolerances, the hair loss. One medication at age two started a chain that dirtied my blood further at every link.
When I addressed what was overloading my blood, the first thing that changed was my digestion. Within weeks, my gut started moving differently. Waste was leaving my body instead of sitting there and leaching into the bloodstream. Then my energy shifted because my blood was carrying less waste. Then my mood changed because cleaner blood was reaching my brain. Then my skin started clearing. Not from a cream. From clean blood reaching the surface for the first time in decades.
And then the asthma resolved.
I was doing heavy physical work one day. Moving furniture. Hauling things up and down stairs for hours. And at some point I stopped and realized I was breathing clearly. No tightness. No wheezing. No inhaler. I had been doing hard labor all day and my lungs were fine.
For my entire life, walking up a flight of stairs left me winded. And now I was moving furniture for hours without a single issue. My blood was clean. My lungs were getting clean, oxygenated blood for the first time in my life. And they worked.
I stood there and I felt something I had never felt before. Not relief. Freedom. For the first time in my life, I knew what it felt like to breathe without medication, without limitation, without the fear that the next breath might not come easily.
I traveled to a tropical country shortly after. I left my inhalers at home. Deliberately. I was under heavy stress. I was lifting heavy things. I was in heat and humidity that should have triggered every symptom I had ever had. Nothing happened. No flare-up. No breathing problems. No eczema. Nothing. My blood was clean. My body was free.
That is when I knew. Not temporarily better. Not in remission. Done.
What it looks like from the other side
I knew the framework was real because I never relapsed. Not once. From the moment I started cleaning my blood, the trajectory was only upward. Incrementally better every week. Every month. No backsliding. No it worked for a while and then stopped. Just consistent, compounding improvement that became a way of living.
I am thirty years old now. Everything about my life is different.
My energy is up tenfold. I wake up alert. I do not drink coffee. I do not take a single supplement. I do not use skincare products. I do not take medication. I have not spent money on my health since I started this framework. Because clean blood does not need management. It just needs to stay clean.
My mood is different in a way that other people noticed before I did. People started commenting on how much easier I was to be around. Which told me how difficult I must have been before. I had a social anxiety that made other people exhausting to me. I could not handle being around people for long. That is gone. People do not drain me anymore. Because my blood is not spending all its resources on internal survival. There is capacity for the outside world now.
My ambition is stronger than it has ever been. When your body is not fighting to survive every day, it has energy for higher things. You stop just getting through the day and you start building something. That is what I am doing now.
And I found something I did not expect. When you have been sick your entire life and you get healthy, it is impossible to hate yourself. I do not mean that as motivation. I mean it structurally. When your blood is clean, when your hormones are regulated, when your body is working the way it was designed to work, the self-hatred that comes with chronic illness dissolves. Because so much of what you thought was your personality, the irritability, the anxiety, the low self-worth, the exhaustion, the isolation, was your blood. Not you. Your blood carrying the wrong things to every cell in your body and making you feel like a broken person when you were just a person with dirty blood.
Clean the blood. And you get yourself back.
This is what I teach. Not because I read it in a textbook. Because I lived it for twenty-eight years and then resolved it in months.
If you are reading this and you see yourself in any part of my story, if you have been managing a condition for years or decades and nothing has permanently resolved it, I want you to know that the state I am in right now is available to you. This is not special to me. This is not genetics. This is not luck. Every human body works the same way. Clean the blood. The body takes care of the rest.
What this has cost you
Add up what you have already spent. The prescriptions since childhood. The creams. The inhalers. The antibiotics. The antifungals. The elimination diets. The supplements. The specialized tests. The functional medicine consults. The wellness products. The skincare that did not work. Whatever the number is, that is a subscription to a body that has been getting dirtier the whole time. The women who exit this get decades back. Not symptoms managed. Decades.
If you are a mother, this is for you too
I want you to look at the timeline I just walked you through. Ten months old in a crib. Two years old on steroid cream. Five years old applying medication every morning. Ten years old carrying an inhaler. Twelve years old with candida and brain fog so heavy I was falling asleep in class. Fifteen years old refusing food because I had learned my body could not handle it. Twenty-eight years old at the bottom.
Every step of that timeline, my mother trusted the system. She was not a bad mother. She was doing exactly what she had been told to do by people with degrees on their walls. The system was incomplete and she did not know it. Nobody told her that the medications were dirtying my blood while suppressing my symptoms. Nobody told her that what was happening on my skin and in my lungs was downstream of a gut that was being destroyed by the very prescriptions meant to help me. So she followed the instructions. And I paid for it for twenty-six years.
If you are reading this and you have a child with eczema, asthma, allergies, focus problems, mood issues, food sensitivities, sleep problems, or any of the conditions doctors will tell you are genetic and chronic and just need to be managed for life, I need you to hear something. Your child is not broken. Your child has dirty blood. And every prescription, every cream, every inhaler, every elimination diet that does not address what is moving through their bloodstream is making the next decade of their life harder, not easier.
You can change the trajectory of your child's entire life by understanding this framework before they are twenty-eight. Not at twenty-eight. Now. While they are four. While they are nine. While they are fourteen. The earlier the blood gets cleaned, the less damage accumulates. The less the gut has been compromised. The less the hormones have drifted. The faster the body responds.
Some of the women I work with come to me for themselves. Some of them come to me because they cannot watch their child go through what they went through, or what I went through. Both are valid. The framework works the same way. The blood is the blood, whether it is yours or your daughter's or your son's.
Where this starts
The Cell Scan is where this starts for you. It is a free document I wrote for women who have managed a condition for years or decades and want to understand what is actually causing it. It is not another protocol. It walks you through why your body stopped responding, what is accumulating in your blood that no test was designed to catch, and what it would take to start again. Most women read it and see their own life on the page.
If you are reading it for your child, the framework is the same. Read it for yourself first. The questions it raises will tell you what to look at in their situation. Whichever way you are entering this, the door is the same.
Twenty-eight years of being sick. Two years of being free. I am not going back. And you do not have to stay where you are.
Vivienne Lamb resolved 27 years of severe eczema, 23 years of steroid creams, asthma, candida, hair loss, and brain fog by addressing what was overloading her blood. She trains women with chronic health conditions to do the same.