What Causes Skin To Turn Green

Introduction

As the medical science reaches greater heights at one side, new kinds of diseases or ailments keep hitting the society on the other side. There are many kinds of skin diseases, and recently I came to learn about an ailment, that resulted in the change of skin color. Last week, my family doctor was visited by a patient, whose complaint was, his skin has got green patches all over. There were no other symptoms. So what could be the possible reason for this green skin? The patient was too concerned about his condition, since he was not sure if this is going to be a serious problem. The doctor, after analyzing the patient with various tests to detect any kind of ailments that the patient might have, decided that it was not a serious issue. The reason for his green skin might be the jewels he was wearing. But there are many different reasons for a person’s skin to turn green, such as anemia, failure of certain organs within the body and so on.

History

The medical field has seen enormous growth over the last few centuries. The history of skin related problems cannot be exactly determined. Since the evolution of mankind, this green skin problem must have been in the existence. The early day medical sciences like ayurveda, sidda or any other traditional method of treatment have treated this ailment with natural herbs or the combination of naturally available products. During the 16th century, it was found that a patient suffering from anemia tends to get affected with a green skin. Anemia results in the reduced hemoglobin within the red blood cells, thus resulting in the discoloration of those cells. The redness of the blood reduces and becomes pale. This might sometime result in the formation of patches of green skin.

Features

There are many ailments that would result in the formation of green patches.

• Hypochromic Anemia: There are different types of anemia, and hypochromic anemia is the generalized term to represent all of its kind. In early days anemia was known as green sickness, due to its tendency of creating green patches at different areas of the body. It is normally caused due to iron deficiency. The persons, who are affected with this kind of anemia which causes green skin, would normally find it difficult to breathe and feel tired all the time.

• Jewels: Apart from different kinds of ailments, a person could get green skin, as a result of the jewel he is wearing. Normally people would love to wear jewels made out of copper. When people sweat, it reacts with the copper jewel resulting in the corrosion of copper and hence salt compounds are formed. The salt of copper is green in color which gets deposited on to the skin of that person. This would result in the formation of green patches, behind the neck of any person.

Apart from the above two cases, the failure of certain organs within the body would sometimes result in the formation of green skin.

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