Imagine that for a moment, you did not have vitiligo. But instead of vitiligo, you had no arms and no legs. Would you life be better or worse than it is now? And why? Meet Nick: Nicholas James “Nick” Vujicic is a Serbian Australian Christian evangelist and motivational speaker born with tetra-amelia syndrome, a rare disorder characterized by the absence of all four limbs. – From Wikipedia.com So Nick has no arms and virtually no legs. And he has learned to turn his problem into an opportunity. He is living a life that he says has “no boundaries.” Nick has managed to touch the lives of over 1 ..read more

One of the first things I tell people that have been diagnosed with vitiligo is that there may be a vitiligo correlation between a gluten intolerance and the spread of their disease. Do I have proof? No. But I strongly suspect that food allergies contribute to the worsening of vitiligo even if food allergies are not the direct cause. Food allergies are something that can be tested and demonstrated. If you have vitiligo, find out if you have food allergies. Don’t cause problems if you don’t have to. Will going gluten free cure your vitiligo? Perhaps not. But, I have noticed that when I eat ..read more

What is a natural holistic approach to vitiligo? It means looking at every system involved with vitiligo, the immune system, the individual’s needs and manage a style of living that promotes health, strength, and dignity for the individual and the world. A holistic approach is in many ways the most challenging, because everything matters. Your choices as an individual are at the center of a holistic approach. It requires that the person take responsibility for their life, to take responsibility for their health, to take responsibility for their dreams and to assume the responsibilities of purs ..read more

Vitiligo doesn’t bother me anymore. This is how I’ve felt for years now. Vitiligo doesn’t effect me anymore. I still have vitiligo. It spreads and contracts on its own. I notice it sometimes. It’s there, but I don’t care. Recently at a coffee shop a woman next to me struck up a conversation. She just wanted someone to talk, and even though I was working on my laptop, she started chatting. Trying to be nice I responded politely. After a few minutes of banter I realized she really wanted to talk. Then she commented on my vitiligo, telling me that I could make it go away if I really wanted t ..read more

Last weekend I went to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forrest in California. It’s a unique place in the White Mountains that looks over the valley to the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. Within this forrest are ancient trees. Some of the trees in this area of over 4000 years old. Some of the carcasses of these trees strewn among the living are over 10,000 years old. These trees have survived and thrived through fires, storms, earthquakes and humanity. They persisted. These ancient patriarchs are a living testament to how life persists in the midst of difficulty and how difficulty shapes that life ..read more

I’ve pursued photography for a year and a half and am loving the process, the work and the images I’m creating, but what surprises me most is this: I’ve learned about dealing with vitiligo through photography. Here’s how it began: When I learned that a regular guy like me could make a picture of the Milky Way, the astronomical feature that’s visible to the naked eye, with regular camera gear I was entranced. I read, searched and practiced Astrophotography until I finally captured my first image of the Milky Way in April 2017. I was elated, excited and encouraged. I put in the work and kept wor ..read more

Vitiligo is so much more than some spots on the skin because it may deeply affect self-esteem. If you have vitiligo, then you know that vitiligo has a set of emotional symptoms and these symptoms are especially frustrating. Shame, embarrassment, anxiety, fear, are all a result of vitiligo and the changes vitiligo represents: How will vitiligo look? Will vitiligo spread? What will people think? Will I be attractive? Am I worth loving? Are people staring at me? All these concerns are rooted in our sense of self, our self-esteem, and vitiligo attacks our sense of self by changing almost ra ..read more

What can we do to combat discrimination against people with vitiligo? Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Martin Luther King, Jr. Perhaps you have never been discriminated against because of vitiligo. Perhaps you have been ignored or mistreated but simply overlooked the issue. Perhaps you have been mistreated, bullied, or made to feel less than. What do we do about it? What can we do in the face of ignorance and a culture of perfection? How can we, as people with vitiligo, as people that love and support others with vitiligo change the conversation on vitiligo and lift up tho ..read more

Why do people discriminate against people with vitiligo? For those of us that have vitiligo, the fear of rejection because of vitiligo goes to our very core. It’s on our minds, it’s in our hearts, it comes across in our actions. One of my readers writes: I have had several bad relationships with guys who never truly accepted me or my body. It’s something we have all feared at one time or another. Perhaps we stop wearing clothes that show vitiligo, perhaps we wear makeup, men and women, to cover vitiligo and perhaps we don’t go outside as often for fear that we would be judged, be rejected bec ..read more

Why is it that so many people don’t know what vitiligo is? How many of us learn about vitiligo after the fact, after our diagnosis? Vitiligo isn’t common knowledge. It’s one of those things we all must confront as we consider the ramifications of a small little spot of depigmented skin that will most likely grow. Even with people like Michael Jackson, Lee Thomas and the model Chantelle Winnie, many people don’t know what vitiligo is. It takes one of us, those with vitiligo to talk about vitiligo. And that can be very hard to deal with. In the mid and late 70s and into the early 80s, a civil ri ..read more