Naoko Ando suffered from an atopic inflammation of the skin for 25 years and received a "standard treatment" of external application of a steroid drug.
It did not work and she stopped it in 2003.
But the termination of the treatment backfired on the associate professor of Toyo University as she experienced a deterioration of her symptoms. It took two years for the biochemist to recover to the extent that she could live daily life without difficulty.