A dermatologist told me that there was no known cause for sebborhea dermatitis – a check online shows there is no known actual cause.
How can this be–we have no idea what causes a skin condition? It can’t be magic.
What is the cause, and if we dont know, why not?
My guess is that some of it is inherited. My father has it and I have it. It comes and goes without any obvious cause.
Why is it so inconceivable that the cause should be unknown? Your question assumes that someone, somewhere knows the answer, which is certainly not guaranteed. Possibly I’m reading too much into this, but the tone of outraged mystification in the OP leads me to suspect that the simple answer “We don’t know because no one has found out yet” isn’t going to be satisfactory, but that might be all there is.
Plenty of things weren’t magic but had no known cause until they were studied in more detail. Triboluminiscence is a case in point. Richard Feynman, writing in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, said:
It’s still true that all the details of the phenomenon are not known, even though plenty of research has been done.
The vast majority of money for medical research goes toward conditions that can kill you or put a major dent in your quality of life.
Dandruff hardly qualifies.
This is the way the world *should * work, isn’t it?
Ah but a lot more people HAVE dandruff (and seborrheic is not dandruff) than have say, Ebola.
Are more people dying horrible deaths caused by dandruff, than say, Ebola?
I would assume that the cause of something is unknown when all the things they’ve examined as possible causes lead to inconclusive results.
“Hmmm. It seems like it could be genetic.”
“But look at all these studies where one twin has it and the other doesn’t.”
“Okay, maybe it’s caused by bacteria.”
“But look at these [not even going to pretend I know what kind of evidence would rule out bacteriological infection as a cause].”
“Shoot. Maybe it’s pixies.”
“There’s no such thing as pixies.”
“Prove it.”
“You can’t prove a negative.”
“You want to come back to my place?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
My Derm. diagnosed me with either sebborheic dermatitis (sp?) or acne rosacea. (Aside: so not only can’t they cure it, they even can’t diagnose it reliably!) After trying many different drugs trying to control it (all the way up to Accutane. My god, avoid this if you can!) we found a simple and cheap way to control it: Tetracycline. I take 500 mg a day and haven’t had a problem with “outbreaks” since. It’s been over 8 years now. (BTW, I’m not a kid. I’m approaching Old Fartdom, actually.) And its cheap! $5.86 for a 90 day supply.
Good Luck,
J.
If it was “just dandruff”, I wouldn’t care. It’s when my skin breaks out in weeping lesions that I get concerned.
Wow I’m being sucked into an internet argument.
No obviously dandruff is not fatal – but that was not the point. If we only spent time on curing the most fatal disease, then life would be overall for the worse.
Ebola = Extremely rare, unheard of in the US
Non-fatal Skin problems = Very common, everywhere in the U.S.
But oh, you are so WITTY 
The rarity of Ebola is irrelevant to our research on it. It’s so catastrophically deadly that we are researching it in case it mutates and becomes very common. We’re also researching it to see if its a possible vector for a bioterror attack in any of a variety of ways.
That sort of research attracts big, big federal grants. Homeland Security and the Pentagon can post up way more money than the United States Department of Skin Care. So, we do more research on ebola than dermatitis.
Do we really? In either dollar terms or scientist-hours per year? If this was true I’d be honestly surprised. Ebola is so rare, so difficult to handle, and (I presume) difficult to obtain in live sample form that I would expect only a relative handful of people to be working on it. Whereas dermatitis in various forms is probably studied in almost every hospital, university and pharma lab in the world.
Really? Despite NIH or whatever looking at the hundreds of billions spent every year on treating skin problems? The US spends several more on health care than it does on the DHS and the Pentagon. And what about Merck, Pfizer, Novartis, L’Oreal and everyone else who is interested in this stuff? In fact I’d expect commercial research alone on dermatitis to be much more than the total research effort on Ebola.
Do you think it’s clever, or WITTY, to suggest that curing Americans for the sake of vanity is more important than saving human lives?
Oh, please. Every year, scads of money is spent on research, product development, manufacture, and purchase of products “for the sake of vanity.” We have scientists working on discovering causes and treatments of all sorts of things “for the sake of vanity.”
I’m with slaphead on this one, when he says,
RR
No need for the ‘please’, thank you. I was just criticizing scrambledeggs’ reference to the relative importance of US ailments over foreign ones. It sounds childish and reinforces that ‘small-minded insular yank’ stereotype. Obviously pharmaceutical companies will go where the profits are. That doesn’t make it a good thing.
Not just pharma companies. One would expect agencies funded by western taxpayers to spend the majority of their effort on things which affect western taxpayers. That means prioritising obesity, cancer, stress-related illnesses and so on above things like ebola.
As to whether something which causes discomfort and irritation to millions of people each year is more or less serious than something which kills hundreds of people a year and make a similar number desperately ill, and the morality of resource allocation - I think that’s GD material rather than GQ.
You’re probably right that private groups spend more on dermatitis than Ebola specifically, but that was my fault for being imprecise. I meant the OP’s seborrheic dermatitis and just used some shorthand. In that respect at least, viral hemorhaggic fevers like ebola almost certainly get more federal dollars. My argument was on government research and in that area, the NIH does not spend billions on skin problems. After glancing at the chart, I’m not sure they spend anything at all on it. Ebola research, on the other hand, is funded by a a number of federal groups.
Looking at that chart, the numbers on bio-defense are pretty high, and that bio-defense budget goes towards ebola and diseases like it which are high deadly but don’t kill many Americans (cite). That doesn’t include the Pentagon’s black-budget CBW teams or USAMRIID which have already funded major programs on ebola.
My judgement is probably a little colored since I work with national security think tanks and organizations daily. I’m used to hearing about ebola way more than dandruff. Still, I’m having a hard time finding anything related to the OP in federal grants. I think it stands as a fair answer to the OP’s question, no?
Must be rosacea because it responds to tetracycline and seborrheic dermatitis doesn’t.
Who says the cause of SD is unknown or that no research is done on it. Lots of research is done on it which led to the concept that it is caused, at least in part, by Malassezia furfur, a yeast, and to the breakthrough treatment, topical ketoconazole (Nizoral), an antifungal, which often works great!
Quickly eyeballing the list, I could only find $10 million for Psoriasis and $12m for Scleroderma. There may be a few bucks tucked into things I don’t recognise (IANAD), but in the grand scheme of things I agree, it rounds to zero. Fascinating list though, and very informative as to the order of priorities. I’d never even heard of Charcot-Marie Tooth Disease.
But as far as NIH are concerned, dermatitis doesn’t really figure, which seems odd. Neither does general allergy other than hay fever, unless it’s tucked into autoimmune or some other category. Is it all left to the private sector?
There is more published research on seborrheic dermatitis than on ebola (Medline indexes 1165 articles on ebola and 2410 on SD), so that argument really does nothing to answer the OP. The simple answer is that the cause has not yet been ascribed to any one factor. Determining the cause of a disease is rarely simple. SD is only one of many diseases that we do not know the cause for, and some things that we thought we knew the cause of are turning to be more complex than we previously thought. Life isn’t simple.