Transcript
Announcer:
You’re listening to DermConsult on ReachMD. On this episode, Dr. Tina Bhutani, Associate Adjunct Professor of Dermatology at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine and owner of Synergy Dermatology, will share her perspective on treatment success in generalized pustular psoriasis. Let’s hear from her now.
Dr. Bhutani:
For me, treatment success is really all about the patient. I think as physicians, we can get hyper-focused on our endpoints. For me, I'm a perfectionist, especially. So as a dermatologist, it's not a great trait—or it might be a great trait. But I'm really trying to get people as clear as I can, and sometimes I'm thinking about switching up treatments and adding things on and doing some creative things. But my patient actually sitting in front of me might be feeling fine. They might be very happy with the way things are going. So I do listen to my patients. I try to say, "Okay, let's find a balance between what I want and what the patient wants."
That being said, though, when it comes to a disease like GPP, a little bit of disease is not good enough. Even if they've gone from severe disease to now much better, if they're still having flare-ups, and even if they're infrequent, I don't want that. So even if the patient might be happy, in these cases, I might actually push them to want better control of their disease. So that makes GPP, I think, a little bit different than most other diseases in dermatology, because there are consequences to not treating.
I think it's important to mention, though, that GPP also is a relapsing remitting disease. So you'll have a flare-up, and then that flare-up might resolve. And then a few months later you might have another acute flare-up. And sometimes there's a known trigger, but oftentimes there's not. And so the goals of treatment should also be not only treating the flare-up that's presenting in the office today, but also decreasing the number of flare-ups that this patient is going to have in their lifetime. So I think those are also two critical things that we look at.
Announcer:
That was Dr. Tina Bhutani discussing her approach to treatment success in generalized pustular psoriasis. To access this and other episodes in this series, visit DermConsult on ReachMD.com, where you can be part of the knowledge. Thanks for listening!
