Dermatology In the News!

For those looking for a looming health crisis, every supposed or maybe-symptom appearing in the life of DJ Trump leads the day’s news. Because DJ is overweight, has a bad diet and does no exercise other than golf (Shaw famously said, “Golf spoils a good walk”) there are comments on his gait, an allegedly droopy face and whatever else prods the imagination of journalists.

Recently, much was made of discolored spots on the back of DJ’s hands that he covered with concealer. In fact this is a benign condition with a name DJ surely hates: purpura senilis or senile purpura. This is a common skin condition characterized by reddish-brown bruises that typically appear on the back of the hands and other sun-exposed parts of the body due to age-related thinning of the skin and sun exposure. They go away.

Senile purpura is a natural condition unlike DJ’s skin color, a color Barack Obama observed is a “color that does not appear in nature.”

My learned description of DJ’s hands raises the question of why I profess to know so much about dermatology.

My grandfather was a founder of modern dermatology, a specialty arising in physicians who treated syphilis, a disease characterized by skin symptoms in the early and late stages. My father was a dermatologist.

Many members of my family, excluding me, are skin doctors. It’s a great and sought-after specialty where there are no emergencies and nobody is cured. And they work three days a week. I heard my cousin Rudolf L.Baer M.D. , a distinguished and soft-spoken German, laugh uproariously when a lady told him that her husband was “cured” of psoriasis. (Remission is not a cure of this incurable disease.) Rudy was a great clinician, a great scientist, a great administrator (NYU Skin and Cancer Institute) and a mensch.

And yet. With all this exposure to medicine from early childhood, I have been a subscriber to the New England Journal of Medicine since I was eighteen. I understand a lot of the articles and figure out the rest with the help of a medical dictionary (fyi semaglutide pills are as effective as the injections according to original research in the NEJM).

I have decided that I am an amateur dermatologist. I don’t treat patients. My “speciality” is a field I created: psychodermatology. This specialty treats psychiatric skin condition such as manic-depressive warts and paranoid psoriasis.

Since I have a lot of the lingo, my friends sometimes ask me about their latest malady. I do my best to satisfy their curiosity.

While many trace their family origins to such businesses as retailing, real estate, or manufacturing. I always tell them that my background is syphilis.