Danya Reich - Top 50 Dermatology Case Studies for Primary Care

This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

The goal of this book is to help primary care doctors get better at dermatology diagnoses and treatment.

This book came about because I was looking at a different dermatology bookaimed at dermatologiststhat was heavy on text, light on pictures, and I said to my colleague, Family Medicine doctors need a lot more pictures! The publisher of that book happened to overhear me, and this book was born.

Over the course of 2 years, I photographed over 300 cases that presented to my primary care office. Sometimes I knew what the skin condition was, sometimes I did not, sometimes I referred to dermatology, sometimes I treated myself, sometimes it was a combination. No matter what, I photographed. Bobby and I reviewed the cases and out of all of them, we chose 50 for this book to represent a cross section of common and unusual, acute and chronic, mild and life-threatening.

As a collaboration between primary care and dermatology, the idea for this book is to present these cases as a primary care doctor encounters themopening the door to the exam room and not knowing what medical condition or body part will be presented, seeing a patients skin lesion, describing it, and figuring out what to do next.

To that end, each case was written first from the primary care point of view and then dermatology weighed in with differential and favored diagnosis, overview and presentation, workup, treatment, and follow-up. Each case then concludes with a Q&A between primary care and dermatology. Lastly, the book is organized by body part as that is often the way we first think of any medical conditionby location.

Our desire is thatwith all this information and with the primary care/dermatology collaborative perspectivethis book would serve as a useful, informative resource for primary care providers.

It is amazing how much this dermatologist does not remember about other parts of the human body. The more experienced I become in the practice of clinical dermatology, the less I recall about general medicine from my training. I am quite certain that as a medical student I was the most well versed in all aspects of medicine that I will ever be, and that it has been a steady decline ever since. Could I manage a hypertensive patient today, the most basic of internist duties? Not a chance.

It is precisely for this reason that I hold the utmost respect for the fields of family medicine and primary care. These doctors are charged with the unique challenge of staying up to date on a dizzying array of advances in contemporary medicine, not just in one field, but in all of them. Clinicians like Danya are oftentimes the first line of defense against illness in any organ system , that is, the first opportunity to render an accurate diagnosis, and treat appropriately.

Danya and I first met as colleagues, and it was not long before we realized the unfortunate disconnect between specialist and primary care. The specialist letters I sent back to her gave an assessment and plan, but were painfully incomplete when it came to helping her appreciate how and why a particular diagnosis was made. And so this text and its format were born.

Each case will take you from presentation to differential diagnosis to pathophysiology to care, just like patients arrive on our doorstep. And just like the doctor ordered, with lots and lots of pictures. We encourage you to enter each case cold, photos first, do not turn the page! See if your differential comports with our own. It need not overlap entirely but should get you in the right ballpark. This approach will ensure you get the most from this text, whether you are a new student just entering the world of cutaneous medicine or an old-timer freshening up. Have fun with it!