Hidradenitis Suppurativa: The Common Condition Nobody Talks About
Hidradenitis suppurativa affects one in a hundred people and takes years to diagnose. What patients report about the flares, the shame, and the biologics changing the outlook.
· By The Editors
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Hidradenitis suppurativa may be the most burdensome common condition most people have never heard of. Painful, recurring abscesses in the most private places — underarms, groin, under the breasts — affecting roughly one in a hundred people, mostly women, with an average diagnostic delay measured in years. People describe cycling through emergency rooms, antibiotics, and shame long before anyone says the words.
Why diagnosis takes so long
Patients describe the pattern: each flare treated as an isolated boil or infection, lanced and forgotten, until someone — often a dermatologist, sometimes an internet forum — connects the recurrence into a syndrome. The relief of a name is a recurring theme in first-person accounts, and so is the anger about the years without one.
Living with it
The daily reality people report goes beyond pain: dressing around drainage, canceling gym sessions and dates, the choreography of hiding flares at work, and the particular loneliness of a condition that feels unmentionable. Depression and anxiety travel with HS at high rates, which patients say clinicians are only beginning to routinely acknowledge.
Treatment is finally an actual landscape
For years the toolkit was antibiotics, steroids, and surgery. Biologics changed that — the first approvals specifically for HS, with more in trials — and people on them describe going from monthly flares to quiet skin, though not universally and not always durably. Laser hair removal, hormonal treatments, and wound-care routines fill out regimens people assemble mostly through trial and error.
Fifty first-person accounts of skin conditions that reshape daily life live on our Skin Conditions shelf. Start with our guide to reading about skin conditions.
Sources and further reading
- Hidradenitis Suppurativa. National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, reviewed June 2022.
- Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS). NHS, reviewed March 2023.
- Hidradenitis suppurativa: Diagnosis and treatment. American Academy of Dermatology, updated June 2026.
- Evaluating patients' unmet needs in hidradenitis suppurativa: Results from the Global Survey Of Impact and Healthcare Needs (VOICE) Project. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, 2020.
- Prevalence of Hidradenitis Suppurativa: A Systematic Review and Meta-regression Analysis. JAMA Dermatology, 2021.
Companion reading, not medical advice. Recurring abscesses deserve a dermatologist's assessment — earlier than most people get one.
The Reading Room publishes personal stories and editorial notes from our press. Everything here is companion reading — never medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. For guidance about your own health, please speak with a qualified clinician. Read how we collect and edit patient testimony in our Editorial Standards, or meet the editors on our Editors & Contributors page.
If this piece was useful, the volumes below hold fifty full-length accounts from people who have been through it — the part an article can only summarise.
