Re: leave them alone!
My mouth is never white except when it is dry, so in the morning, like all people and it's totally normal. Once the saliva production comes back, I have no whiteness at all.
My upper lip was always swollen (1/3), also my lower one (2/3), when I was using creams which always remove skin from my lips so it's normal that it hurts given that there is a lack of skin, the vermillon in this case.
As I say, it's really weird to take a time so long to heal, that's why I'm trully convinced that, like others matters, there are optimal conditions to heal as quickly as possible.
I'm sure that it's a very trivial problem, that's why just very few people, ourselves included, are concerned, and because of, above all, the wrong way with which dermatologists and doctors have tried to treat it.
For the most of us, we went through a stress period mixed with a chapped lips period in which we had had the mistake of pulling out our lips, CHRONICALLY.
Hence, it's totally normal to have some kind of flakes which grow up but instead of waiting, we had again had the mistake of applying something on our lips, in my case it was a commercial lipbalm in first, and from there, a vicious circle had settled down, and this did not settle when we started to consult some doctors and dermatologists, apply all theirs shits of chemicals, on the contrary, this even did get worse.