Many scientists are quick to point out that it isn’t so much their intelligence that makes them successful. Rather, it is their willingness to passionately persevere longer than others to find solutions to what seem to be unsolvable problems. For Dr. Michael Tick, laboratory director of the Institute for Skin Sciences (ISS), passionate perseverance was the fuel feeding his 35 years of study, research and tests that led to the overturning of a long-held health paradigm.

From the earliest medical practitioners to the scientists of the 21st century, it was believed that all the body’s internal organs could in some way affect and influence the skin—but not the reverse. In other words, applying a topical product intended to penetrate the various layers of the skin in order to affect the healing of internal organs was considered impossible, because the skin’s layers prevented total absorption. The ISS and Tick’s research results have proven otherwise.

Tick’s and the ISS health concept, TDI-38, is a transdermal infusion remedy. Based upon a new group of protocols for diagnosis and treatment, topical agents created from natural, organic botanicals and herbs are formulated and developed to work with the skin. The application of these customized topical creams, lotions and gels that penetrate through all seven layers of the skin to the inner body, is similar to other transdermal applications such as nicotine, contraceptive and motion sickness patches.

Tick has always been fascinated by the chemistry of the human body and how it works. After graduating from college, he was employed by a private laboratory as a biochemist, working on health products for human consumption. Several years later, he found that while his work was intellectually stimulating and gratifying, it lacked sufficient human interaction. “I loved being a lab rat, but I never got to meet the people I was helping,” says Tick, who returned to college to become a naturopathic doctor.

As a doctor, Tick appreciated that after a patient exam and diagnosis, he could go to his laboratory to customize formulas to help the patient’s body heal itself. He recalls, “When it didn’t work, I went back to my lab to reformulate the recipe, because I told my patients, ‘I believe that there is always an answer, so if you won’t quit on me, I won’t quit on you.’”

When Tick created the ISS 35 years ago, he began with the idea that the institute would be the world’s premier go-to organization for knowledge and accurate information about the body’s largest organ. The first 10 years of the institute’s existence were spent on studying the skin. At the beginning of the second decade, the computer became an integral part of the team’s research.

“When the information from the first 10 years was entered, we were surprised by an interesting outcome: Nearly every time we changed someone’s skin, something inside their body changed, also,” notes Tick, who for the following decade directed the team to research not only skincare, but also how to use the skin as a vehicle to get inside the body. “It took another 10 years to learn how to penetrate the skin and use it for a diagnostic tool, which meant figuring out where on the skin we could get information on the liver, lungs, heart, etc., and what botanicals and herbs we needed to use to do that,” he says.

During the next seven years, Tick’s team tested 5,000 healing herbs and stimulated every inch of the skin before pinpointing 38 spots that speak a language that Tick interprets with a remarkable degree of accuracy. “By applying natural botanicals and herbs to specific areas of the skin and then studying the amount of penetration, we are able to analyze internal irregularities,” explains Tick, who communicates back to the skin with transdermal infusions that give the body’s organs and systems what they need to begin a self-repair process.

“We solve nine out of 10 cases,” Tick advises. “More importantly, our treatments are safe and non-invasive, with no side effects.”

Institute for Skin Sciences, 3061 Terrace Ave., Naples 34104. Call 239-732-7116 or visit InstituteForSkinSciences.com.