Skin

I'm doing dermatology for the next two weeks. This is a short elective rotation, fairly distinct from my career goals but nevertheless an interest. In our curriculum, we don't get much skin; there were probably only two or three lectures in my first two years. But after third year, especially in medicine and pediatrics, I realized the importance of the rash. I also realized how difficult it is to translate a vivid image of a rash into words. How can you capture the striking appearance of psoriasis in dry scientific descriptors like "scaly silvery papules and plaques"? And the converse, how do you take someone's description of a "brown verrucous stuck-on lesion" and translate that to a seborrheic keratosis? And what is a seborrheic keratosis? Indeed, dermatology is such a visual field; much of this rotation is learning to speak the language to communicate an image, but in the end, we just pull other people into a room to see.

The rotation itself is not bad. There's a good amount of self-study with online modules and textbook chapters to read. We have a few didactic sessions and a presentation. Otherwise, we have a mix of general dermatology and specialty clinics, shadowing and independence, surgery and steroids.