ABOUT
Who writes this, and how
Jakub Pilch
Ostrava, Czech Republic · builder of Exemio
I've had eczema since I was a kid — more than a decade of creams, elimination diets, and dermatologists who told me to avoid my triggers without ever telling me how to find them. I'm a software developer, and eventually I got frustrated enough to build the tool I wanted: an app that logs your day in seconds and looks for the patterns behind your flares.
The writing here came out of the same frustration. Every question I had — does drinking water help, does the sea help, is it the stress — I answered by reading the actual research, and the answers were usually more interesting and less flattering than what the internet says.
What I'm not
I'm not a doctor, a dermatologist, or a researcher. I have no medical training. What I have is a chronic skin condition I've lived with for most of my life, and the habit of reading primary sources before believing things.
That combination is genuinely useful for some questions and useless for others. It means I can tell you what a trial actually measured and whether the popular summary of it is fair. It does not mean I can tell you what to put on your skin. For that, see a dermatologist — and if your skin is broken, weeping or infected, do that before trying anything you read anywhere, including here.
How the guides are written
These are the rules I hold myself to. They're listed here so you can check whether I'm keeping them.
- Primary sources, linked. Every claim that matters points at the study, the guideline, or the organisation it came from — not at another blog post summarising it. If I could only find a secondary source, I say so.
- Evidence gets graded, not flattened. A randomised trial and one person's anecdote are both allowed on the page, but never dressed up as the same thing. Where the evidence is weak, the article says the evidence is weak — that's an answer too.
- No cures, no percentages, no before-and-afters. Nothing here will promise to clear, heal or fix your skin, because nothing can honestly promise that.
- A pattern is a lead, not a diagnosis. Even a correlation in your own carefully logged data is a hypothesis to test — ideally with your doctor — not proof that something causes your flares.
- I say when I'm the exception. On sea water I'm in the minority the remedy doesn't work for, and the article says so up front, so you can weigh it.
- Corrections are made in public. If something here is wrong, email me and I'll fix it and mark the article as updated with the date. Every guide shows when it was published and when it last changed.
The conflict of interest, stated plainly
I build and sell Exemio, an eczema tracking app. It's free to start and has a paid subscription. The guides on this site mention it, which means I have an obvious incentive to make tracking sound more useful than it is.
The way I try to keep that honest: the articles tell you the method works with a notebook too, they say when a thing I'd benefit from selling you isn't supported by evidence, and they don't pretend the app finds your triggers on day one — it can't, and neither can anything else.
I take no money from brands, run no affiliate links, and accept no sponsored mentions. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page first.
About your data
Exemio is built in the EU and your health data is stored in the EU. It is never sold. The app doesn't require photos of your skin. The website uses first-party, cookieless analytics — no third-party trackers — which is why the privacy claim on the home page is literally true rather than marketing. Details in the privacy policy.
Read the guides
Nothing on this site is medical advice, and Exemio is not a medical device. If you have a skin condition, a dermatologist is the right person to advise you on treatment.