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Hopkins Health
Sharing New Insights and Therapies
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| Dermatologist Lisa Beck, M.D. |
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In mid-August, some two dozen residents and medical students fill a small conference room in Dermatology to listen to Lisa Beck, M.D. The researcher’s topic, as usual, is atopic dermatitis, or AD, an inflammatory skin disease she’s been studying for 15 years. Her audience knows that she’s the person to go to not only for the latest therapies, but also for new insights into the mechanism of the disease. After all, a desire to understand the disease was what attracted her to becoming a researcher in the first place.
“I was a full-time clinician for two years,” Beck says, “before I started asking myself questions that medical students are asking me today: ‘Is atopic dermatitis actually atopic? Is it an allergic disease?’”
Realizing she didn’t know much about the inner workings of the disease, she dove in head first. Now she spends about 95 percent of her time researching AD and sharing her findings at dermatology meetings around the country, with community physicians, and with students and residents. Too much educational outreach is not enough, she explains, as AD is difficult to diagnose and manage. The conventional therapy of systemic steroids, she adds, carries serious side-effects, including diabetes, edema, hypertension, osteoporosis and weight gain.
So, for the next hour she mixes the latest research related to disease mechanisms and the latest research related to emerging therapies that don’t have the side-effects of steroids. Macrolides and other immunomodulators have proven effective in treating moderate to severe eczema. Also, an alternative therapy has shown some effect. The take-home message is you can’t treat it unless you know it—and have an open mind.
“The longer you’re in medicine,” Beck says, “the more you realize the person who makes the greatest breakthroughs is the person who is willing to believe that anything is possible.”
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