Explanation of Ichthyosis and Bathing

I read this on a website and thought it was a good explanation of how Ichthyosis works and why it may be good to bathe Kallie twice a day:

With ichthyosis, the molecule that makes the skin waxy is broken. Different genes cause breaks at different places in the skin, but the end result is the same - people with ichthyosis do not have the protective waxy layer on the surface that keeps them from drying out just from regular activity. They are constantly losing water at 4 to 7 times the rate that your skin loses water. This translates into dehydration, which translates into difficulty in regulating body temperature through sweat.

The body tries to compensate for the water loss by increasing the skin growth rate. This is where the scaling comes in. You have skin that grows too fast to keep it thick to keep the water in, which doesn't work anyway because the top layer is dead and not hydrated by blood flow or by skin oil, which is produced at the normal rate, so there's never enough for the amount of skin. Sweat glands get blocked and the thicker skin is an insulator, which compounds the overheating problem.

Now...bathing with ichthyosis helps fix these problems. You are essentially rehydrating the skin from the outside. So bathing multiple times a day helps some people, while extended soaks once a day are better for others. Either way, while wet, we take advantage of the softened skin to abrade some of it off and kill some of the skin bacteria that tends to accumulate and cause the keratin smell. Once the bath is done, we go right back to dehydration mode, so the most important thing is to apply a layer of cream everywhere as soon as possible to hold in the water that soaked into the skin during the bath.