Shiitake mushrooms are delicious… for most of us. For some of us though, they are a disaster! Oh boy, can they make you itch if you are one of those folks. This patient allowed us to share his photos and discuss his case because it’s pretty interesting. It turns out that a few days prior to seeing us, he had eaten some shiitake mushrooms at lunch and shortly after that he broke out in this extremely pruritic (itchy) skin eruption in these linear streaks on his chest and back. The pictures you see here are, in fact, so characteristic of the problem caused by mushrooms that within a minute of seeing him, the physician was already asking about shiitake mushrooms. Yep. He was eating them, and they were probably undercooked. This story has a happy ending though. We gave him some steroids, made his itching go away pretty quickly. As you can see below, at his 8 day follow up, it almost 100% better.
Do you or does someone you know break out in a similar looking rash after eating shiitake mushrooms? Why not send this article along? We would love to help someone identify a cause of their skin problem so they can avoid it.
