About Acne Control

This section of the Acne Control site includes the legal necessities found on every website - terms of use, disclaimer, copyright notice, contact details - together with some background information about the website's aims and its author. It might be reassuring to some users to know that the person writing about the management and treatment of acne has a degree in medicine, rather than media studies.

Another Acne Website?

There are so many acne websites around that people might reasonably argue that the last thing required was yet another one. However, having looked at a number of acne sites, it was clear that few were really meeting the needs of the ordinary acne sufferer. The existing acne websites tended to divide into four distinct types:

  1. The Purely Medical Approach to Acne in which the concept of acne being a condition which affects people is swapped for one in which acne is a skin disease which interests doctors and medical students. In fairness, most of these sites are not intended for the general reader, who would scarcely be able to wade through all the medical terminology and impenetrable language anyway.
  2. The Acne Survivor's Guide to Acne is how I term a series of sites written by people who suffered terribly from acne in their youth and want to share their experiences with the world. These acne websites offer often extremely good advice on the emotional and psychological aspects of acne, but tend to fall down on certain technical and medical aspects of acne care.
  3. Acne Treatment Promotion Sites which are being used to promote a single type of acne treatment. Whilst there is nothing inherently wrong with such sites, they are not the place to find impartial information about the benefits and risks of different forms of acne treatment. Most are promoting acne treatments which are both legitimate and effective, but a small minority are promoting acne products or treatments which are at best offer no benefit to the acne sufferer and at worst may be positively harmful.
  4. Content Free Acne Sites are not developed for the benefit of acne sufferers or as a means to impart useful information about the condition. Indeed such sites rarely contain any original material at all, but instead consist of the 'scraped' content of other acne websites intermingled with large numbers of gaudy advertisements, all bound together with a good degree of cynicism. Such sites may have a life expectancy of only 2-3 months and are an opportunistic attempt to make money from advertisers before copyright holders and the search engines' duplicate content filters catch up with them.

There is nothing wrong in any of these approaches, except perhaps the fourth type of site, but each seems to place its emphasis too heavily on a single aspect of the condition. I saw an opportunity to develop a website offering a more balanced and people orientated approach to acne, which would be of practical benefit to both acne sufferers and their friends and relatives.

A Different Approach to Acne

I came to the task of developing the acne control website from a somewhat unusual direction. Of the four types of existing acne website, I lacked the credential to write an 'acne survivor's guide', didn't have an acne treatment product to promote and had absolutely no desire to create a 'content free' acne site. I was in a position where I could simply have written a medically orientated guide to acne, since I qualified as a doctor in 1990 after the obligatory five years 'without remission' at medical school. However, within a year of qualifying I developed a serious illness spent nearly a year as a hospital in-patient, following which I abandoned my medical career and ended up, via a rather tortuous route, as the director of an Internet Marketing company. I have the advantage of having a foot in both camps. My background in medicine means that I can understand its language and technical complexities, but I have distanced myself from the medical world sufficiently to recognise some of its shortcomings. I decided that I wanted to take a different approach and develop an acne website which would:

The result of all those good intentions was the creation of the Acne Control website. I hope you enjoy reading it and find it useful.