Itching and Scratching

Itching and Scratching

Tickle, Touch, Scratch It starts with a tickle. You brush your hand against your skin, but the tickle continues. You can't help but scratch. Ahh, relief, but it lasts just a moment. Then the feeling returns, even stronger. Before long, you're scratching away again. We've all had that experience. There are dozens of reasons for itching, and there's a good explanation for why scratching seems to relieve an itch.

More Than Skin-Deep When you think of itching, you usually think of skin. It's true that itching happens mostly on your skin. After all, skin covers your whole body. Skin is also the only thing that stands between the inside of your body and the outside world. All sorts of things touch your skin. Skin has nerve cells that react when something touches it. Some of those things are harmless. Some, however, are harmful or even dangerous. An itch is your body's way of warning that these things can hurt you. For example, many people are allergic to poison ivy. This plant has irritating oils that rub off on skin. The oils make skin blister and ooze. Open blisters can get infected. The oils can also affect other parts of the body, like the nose and lungs. Contact with poison ivy can cause a bad infection to develop.

Your body uses itching to keep infections from happening. Itching is a signal from your immune system-your body's internal system that helps protect you from sickness. When you touch poison ivy, your immune system triggers an itch. This informs you that your skin has touched something harmful. In this case, the itch teaches you to stay away from poison ivy.

Causes of Itching It's not just your skin that itches. Your eyes can feel itchy, too, and so can your nose and throat. Scratching is a reflex action to itching-something you do automatically, or without thinking. However, you can't reach down your throat to scratch it, so you cough. You can't scratch inside your nose, so you sneeze. Scratching your eyes can cause damage, so you rub them instead. All those actions have the same goal: to remove whatever is causing the itch. Perhaps you ate something spicy. Maybe you breathed dust or got smoke in your eyes. A good cough, sneeze, or rub could get rid of the problem!

Sometimes, though, you can't get rid of the cause of your itch easily. Sometimes the cause comes from a germ inside your body. The itch you feel may be part of a sickness caused by the germ. Chicken pox is a sickness caused by a virus. The virus makes the skin break out in very itchy blisters. Today, many children get a vaccine to prevent them from getting chicken pox. Luckily, for those who do get sick, chicken pox is a temporary condition. After a while, the sickness passes.