Paradigm Shifts in Lab Monitoring
How to Mitigate Risk without Compromising Care
If you were to counsel a patient on every possible risk of a given medication, it would be a long list of extreme and rare potential outcomes and almost certainly leave the patient in doubt whether it is safe even to take. Frequent lab monitoring has been common practice and often used to reduce the perception of risk with systemic medication …
How to Mitigate Risk without Compromising Care
If you were to counsel a patient on every possible risk of a given medication, it would be a long list of extreme and rare potential outcomes and almost certainly leave the patient in doubt whether it is safe even to take. Frequent lab monitoring has been common practice and often used to reduce the perception of risk with systemic medication … 
Alopecia areata is a form of non-scarring hair loss that affects both children and adults, causing significant quality of life impairment. Varying from localized to widespread hair loss, including alopecia totalis and universalis variants, alopecia areata can be self-resolving or chronic in its course. For years and in some cases centuries, treatment was limited to caustic substances that irritate … 
A patient in my clinic was recently prescribed 5-fluorouracil for severe photodamage, diffuse actinic keratoses. He is 24 years old and, unfortunately, lacked knowledge about photoprotection. It was sobering to think about how much longer he has to live and the damage already done. Strides have been made over the years in educating our patients about photoprotection, but recently, patients have … 
The gut-immune-skin axis describes how the gut microbiome communicates with the skin via complex interactions with the immune system to regulate local and systemic inflammation. Before attempting to delineate that relationship, we must first grasp a firm understanding of the gut ecosystem. The gut ecosystem is made up of the epithelial interface, which is characterized by
the epithelial … 
Dermatologist and artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Roxana Daneshjou, MD, PhD weighs in on Google's Derm Assist tool and the current and future outlook of artificial intelligence in the specialty.
Google’s announcement of its new dermatology search tool – Derm Assist -- made headlines recently for putting artificial intelligence to work in identifying possible skin conditions. The too … 