“The appeal of the Derm Deck is that it’s easy to transport and readily available for people who need a brief update on what they’re seeing in the clinic in real time.” – Dr. Shane Chapman
I attended medical school at the University of Texas at Houston and was on track to become an internist. I had never rotated through dermatology and didn’t really know anything about the specialty until I was intern in internal medicine and got my first glimpse of skin, skin disease, and dermatology. I took a pretty unconventional route in that I became interested in dermatology after medical school. I applied for dermatology residencies after internship and was lucky enough to get a dermatology residency at Dartmouth-Hitchcock one year after graduating from medical school.
One of the new, exciting, and cutting edge things that is happening in dermatology is laser availability and improved technology in light, laser and photo therapy. Monoclonal antibodies are now a mainstay in dermatologic treatment for inflammatory diseases and cancers—psoriasis in particular. So in the book and in the Dermatology Deck we’ve tried to incorporate both laser cosmetic procedures, complications of those procedures, as well as incorporating the newer therapies that are out there, including the monoclonal antibody therapies, the injectable therapies for psoriasis and other diseases. Also, many dermatologists these days are travelling to underdeveloped countries to volunteer. So, we’ve put a section in the book for travel medicine and travel dermatology that includes diseases that we don’t see very often in the United States. If you do any travelling to Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, you’ll see some very different diseases, mostly infectious in nature.
Several years ago, a colleague at Dartmouth, Dr. Thomas Habif, approached me to write a succinct dermatology textbook that was geared toward the early-stage dermatology resident. It was a basic, not encyclopedic, dermatology textbook with really great photographs and very clear writing on the basis of disease and basic treatment options. That book, Skin Disease, is now in the third edition, and has taken off. I think the photographs are its major appeal to most dermatologists and non-dermatologists. The photographs are large and very clear, which helps in the clinic with diagnosis, both for dermatologists and non-dermatologists. It’s been very well received by the people who buy it and read it.
In addition to Skin Disease, the other publication that we have with Elsevier is the Dermatology DDX Deck, which is a new type of media for education. The Derm Deck is a laminated, bound deck of cards that you can easily put in your pocket. Like the textbook, it has great photographs, but it also has very brief blurbs of the diagnosis and treatment of the diseases on the backside of the card. It contains the most common 200 or so dermatologic diseases, so the appeal is that it’s easy to transport and readily available for people who need a brief update on what they’re seeing in the clinic in real time. It’s very different from any other media that’s out there today. Also, both Skin Disease and the Derm Deck have been translated into multiple languages, including Mandarin Chinese, which I don’t think, at this point, has been done by another textbook.
M. Shane Chapman, MD, serves as section chief of dermatology within the Department of Surgery at Dartmouth Medical School. Among his specialties are cutaneous oncology and melanoma immunotherapy, psoriasis, and laser and light therapy. He is an author of the Dermatology DDX Deck and the third edition of Skin Disease.
Dr. Chapman holds an MD from the University of Texas at Houston Medical School. He completed an internship in internal medicine at the University of Texas at Houston Medical School and a residency in dermatology at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. He is board certified in dermatology.
Related Authors: Thomas P. Habif, MD; James L. Campbell, Jr., MD, MS; James G. H. Dinulos, MD; Kathryn A. Zug, MD
