Mother spent around £500 on steroid cream

"How could anyone look at a mother with a sick baby in her arms and tell her the cream didn't have steroids?" asks Ms Joanne …

"How could anyone look at a mother with a sick baby in her arms and tell her the cream didn't have steroids?" asks Ms Joanne Pierce.

She used the Cherrydex cream on her daughter, Leanne, for two years and now fears the prolonged treatment could have damaged her.

Leanne was admitted to hospital with eczema when she was five months old. Ms Pierce then heard that Donal Walsh had an eczema cream that was "absolutely brilliant". When she visited his clinic, she had to pay a £10 fee before she could order the cream. A jar of Cherrydex cost £30.

Concerned about prolonged use, she asked Mr Walsh if the cream contained steroids. "He looked me straight in the eye and said `No way,' " she recalls.

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The cream cleared up Leanne's eczema, and Ms Pierce continued to use it for two years. She even found herself ordering it for other mothers.

"I don't know how many hundreds of pounds I spent, but I have all the Visa bills there. It's costly enough having young children and no one has money to throw away, but when I think of all the money he made, it's very, very unfair that he should only have been fined £3,000."

Ms Deborah O'Shea estimates that she spent about £500 on Walsh's cream. She knows of another person who spent £800.

When her daughter Rebecca developed eczema, she took her to her doctor, who prescribed steroid cream. However, this could only be used for a short period and when it was not being used, the eczema returned.

She then heard about Walsh's herbal cream. "We were told it was herbal and safe and there was no problem using it all the time," she said. "He told us to apply it six times daily. It didn't matter if it got into her eyes or nose, he said.

"We believed everything we were told and we were so desperate we would have tried anything. She suffered so much with it and she was only a tiny baby."

Ms O'Shea started using the cream on Rebecca when she was 2-1/2 months old and used it for about seven months. Initially the cream cleared the eczema, but then Rebecca's skin reacted badly to it, developing a severe rash. After being taken off the cream, the baby suffered other side-effects, which were diagnosed as withdrawal symptoms.

Both Leanne and Rebecca now seem to be "growing out of" the skin condition. "We would hate to think that anyone else would go through this," Ms O'Shea says. "All I would say to anyone is to go to your doctor. Your doctor knows best."