Today was a fairly dry day of lectures back up at campus (check out
yesterday's post for a week's worth of juicier clinical fare). We started with dermatology, then a miserable lecture on HIV, some antibiotic practice and EKG interpretation. After a far too brief lunch, we came back for a stuffy lecture on congestive heart failure by our stuffy chairman of medicine and then we ended with a lecture on palliative care and pain management.
TIL: Urticaria pigmentosa, or maculopapular cutaneous mastocytosis, is a weird condition where mast cells accumulate in blobs on the skin. These immune cells release histamine, one of the chemicals that makes you itchy. So if you poke one of these spots on their skin, within a few minutes a big itchy red wheal will form.
Derm lightning round!
- nummular: round; as in nummus, Latin for "coin"
- arciform: arc forms
- serpiginous: snake-like
- ichthyotic: fish-scale-esque
- koebnerization: spreading a lesion by patient interaction (e.g. a rash that spreads to the areas you scratch)
Ways to be wrong 95% of the time, but scary-awesome the other 5%: If someone has a rash around their mouth, ask if they like to eat mangos. If no, then delicately ask if they suck their thumb. Both of these are reasonably common explanations for a perioral rash and you'll look like a mind reader if you call out a(n unknowingly allergic) mango enthusiast or adult thumb-sucker.
No comments:
Post a Comment