During a recent interview with Metal Injection, Meshuggah’s Tomas Haake further discussed his struggles with eczema on his hands. Fortunately, the drummer is “getting better.”

Haake said the following:

“I had this problem. It started two years ago. In January of 2020, I started getting eczema on the inside of my hands. Obviously, ‘perfect’ for a drummer — I mean, it’s ‘perfect’ for anyone, ’cause we all need our hands to function for just day-to-day life. So it’s not just about an annoying thing to play drums and to have this condition; it’s annoying for everything you do. And I’m probably one of the few people on earth that did not put alcohol [hand sanitizer] on my hands at all once during the whole pandemic thing, because I basically couldn’t; I would have probably fainted. ‘Cause I used to have all these cracks and stuff in my hands because of this skin condition. But it’s actually, yes, it’s getting better, and — knock on wood — over the last week it’s been getting a lot better. And hopefully it’s going the right way.”

He also talked about the treatment he received:

“I talked to a nutritionist, actually. ‘Cause I’ve been to all the… I don’t know how many doctors and places I’ve been to since this started, and we’ve done all the tests that you can do as far as contact eczema and on your back, all those patches and stuff like that — I did that twice. And I went to a psoriasis place — they thought initially that it was psoriasis related — so I had 30 sessions of UV light kind of sessions for my hands. Nothing helped; nothing had done anything. So a buddy of mine, a drummer buddy here in Stockholm, suggested I talk to this guy that he knew who is a nutritionist for one of the soccer teams here in Stockholm. And so I called him up and we spoke, like, probably about an hour and a half and I described how it all started and what kind of life I live and all that stuff. And he basically told me, ‘Start eating Q10, coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10), because I think there might be something there. You’re not producing this stuff enough, and that will have an effect.’ ‘Cause I also started losing my hair and stuff like that way faster than I had been. So I figured this is connected. And I’ve known, or felt, all along that this was not contact allergy related at all, because I tried everything. I used these cotton gloves for months on end. As soon as I was touching anything, like as far as keyboard mouse, anything that you would come in touch with on a daily basis, I was using gloves and it didn’t do any difference either. So my belief was always more that it’s internal something. And actually after now — this is day number five or six of taking Q10, and it’s way, way better. So, knock on wood, but if it keeps going like this, it’s definitely going the right way, for sure.”

He continued after being asked how he initially discovered his issue:

“I remember we were at a hotel in Venice Beach [California] right after the NAMM show of 2020, and we were watching movies in bed and I was holding this tablet of mine that had like a foldout thing, so I was holding that for a few hours. And the day after, it actually started. It started like a contact eczema right in those points where I’d been holding this tablet. So it just started on my two index fingers and my thumbs. But over time, it changed into something else and it started spreading all over my hands and stuff. So it went from maybe it started because of something going on with my immune system or something — maybe it started as a contact eczema; that was the triggering thing — but then it was something else that made it not go away but turn into this monster inside my hands.”

He also added:

“Apart from when we rehearsed for the [upcoming MESHUGGAH] album, which would have been maybe a month that we rehearsed before the album and then actually recording the album, I haven’t really played any drums at all since August 2019. Because to play, I have to really severely tape all my fingers and thumbs and I have to put both hands into gloves and then use grip tape on both sticks. And I have been using a stickwrap thing on the right stick and a glove on my right hand for a bunch of years, but that’s more to relax my arm and not use so much force to kind of hold on to the stick. I started doing that more for kind of ergonomic reasons than anything else. But this now turned into something I have to really, really, really tape everything up. The scary part is it’s one thing to do that when you’re in rehearsal and you can just [say], ‘Stop, stop stop. I’ve gotta retape this.’ And the same in this studio — you can take whatever time you need. But to go out and play live for an hour and a half, obviously, it’s not gonna work. You can’t just stop the show and tape up your hands. So, of course, it’s been kind of scary… I really [tried] to remain positive and not just go dark over the whole thing. And I didn’t. I really kind of just — not ‘shrugged’ it off is the wrong word, because I did go to see a lot of different people and dermatologists and doctors and stuff.”

Haake also expressed disapproval with basic health services in Sweden:

“The problem — it’s a little annoying — is that general care [in Sweden], when you go to a hospital and stuff, unless you really pay a shit-ton of money to go see people that will care about you properly because you pay them to care about you, regular care at a hospital, they won’t really look at everything that you tell them. They have their certain way of, like, ‘Yeah, but we do these tests like this because this is how we do them. We go through this test.’ I tell them, ‘We don’t have to do that because I know it’s not that.’ ‘Yeah, but we do it like this,’ and you have to either accept that or you have to go somewhere else and pay your way for every little thing. And just like in the U.S., if you go that route — you can here — but just like in the States, it would be insanely expensive. But it is a little annoying that they don’t really look at it holistically. It was not really much interest or talks about the kind of life I live, what I eat, what I could be missing, if there’s something that’s missing and stuff like that. Yeah, that’s a little annoying sometimes in this case. And if nothing else, it’s what made it take two years before I talked to the right person about this. At least that’s how it feels now, because right off the bat, he was, like, ‘This is internal. I promise you it’s internal. You’re lacking something that makes… You don’t have the repairing. The firefighters are gone. They’re not going to your hands to repair it. And that’s usually then something internally.'”

[via Blabbermouth]

During a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Meshuggah’s Tomas Haake revealed that he is battling eczema. The skin condition has been affecting the drummer’s hands and his doctors have yet to find a treatment to help him.

Haake said the following:

“I have this eczema inside my hands. I’ve got to tape up all my fingers and put on gloves just to mess around on the kit, even. That means I haven’t really touched the drums since we recorded the album, and that was, like, early April. So I’m almost a year out, without even hitting a drum.”

He continued:

“I’ve been to so many specialists and dermatologists about this at this point and they’re all like, ‘Huh?’ They say it looks like contact eczema, but we’ve ruled that out because I’ve done all the tests that you can do, as far as anything that I might come in contact with. It goes up and down, but it’s a bummer, for sure, whether you’re a drummer or not. I mean, we all need our hands to function for daily life.”

He also added that he still intends to perform:

“These hands are bumming me out, man. I try to stay positive about things like this and not allow myself to just get all depressed over it. It is what it is. We’ll see if some new doctor has something important to tell me that helps me clear this up. But, yeah, I mean, if not, I will still have to play.”