I understand how some people might think that NOT wanting to take Prednisone for poison oak is giving in to "hysteria". That's OK. I'm just of the mind that, as uncomfortable as poison oak might make you feel, it is quite unlikely to kill you or leave you with scars. Most (though surely not all) ailments will resolve themselves in time. Doctors (no surprise) have a bias toward doing something...ANYTHING! That's what most patients want and expect. But many doctors reflexively prescribe systemic medication in the absence of any firm evidence that it will help. A good example is the use of antibiotics before an offending microbe is identified..."just in case it's a bacterial infection". Here in my dotage I have come not to trust doctors so much anymore. While many are sensitive, intelligent and dedicated, just as many are arrogant, ignorant and cavalier about their treatments...wanting, first and foremost, to protect themselves from allegations of malpractice. I say that, before you let YOUR doctor attack a garden snail with a machine gun, he or she ought to be prepared to explain your options...including the option of doing nothing! I read stories on this Q&A Board in which people say that it took them six weeks to defeat their poison oak...WITH steroids! I also read stories from people who claim to recover in only a few days WITHOUT steroids. I don't know how to evaluate these anecdotes but the TYPICAL recovery time seems to be somewhere between two weeks and six weeks. Where is (are) the clinical data to show that the use of Prednisone is more likely (than not) to speed recovery? Once again, I realize that for SOME cases of poison oak, Prednisone can be a life-saver; but I venture to conclude that for MOST cases, it is a needlessly aggressive approach. Thanks for reading.
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