DermHelpCentral

Bitten to the Quick

This is the story of an apartment dweller in New York, pigeons, and bird mites.

Bird Mites

In the spring of 2013, a family of pigeons nested in scaffolding outside my apartment building two blocks off St. Nicholas Avenue in Manhattan’s Washington Heights. From the window of my first-floor apartment, I heard the cheeping of baby birds and affectionately observed their downy forms and tiny black-tipped beaks: my very own slice of nature.

But in May, when the squabs matured into fledglings and flew off, it seems that a horde of barely visible parasites that had been feeding off them — bird mites — needed a new blood supply. They launched an Old Testament-worthy invasion of the first-floor apartments. Relentless and nocturnal, the bugs robbed us all of sleep, raising painful red bites on my skin that were ringed with bruises. They appeared to prefer warm and damp locales: hair, nasal passages, ear canals, folds in skin and, most alarmingly, groins. 

Full Article appeared in the NY Times Magazine, Sunday, September 21, 2013.

Should We All Take a Bit of Lithium?

Mother Nature has already put a psychotropic drug in the drinking water, and that drug is lithium. Although this fact has been largely ignored for over half a century, it appears to have important medical implications.

See NYTimes article. 

This is a fascinating article by Anna Fels, a psychiatrist who teaches at Weil Cornell Medical College in NYC.  Lithium's atomic weight is close to 7.  It was in the original 7-Up and some have suggersted that "7-Up" stands for the salutary effects of Li on mood.  Go figure!

Novel Melanoma Drug August 2014

F.D.A. Allows First Use of a Novel Cancer Drug   (September 4, 2014, NY Times)

The drug, which Merck will sell under the name Keytruda, was approved for patients with advanced melanoma who have exhausted other therapies.

Cancer researchers have been almost giddy in the last couple of years about the potential of drugs like Keytruda, which seem to solve a century-old mystery of how cancerous cells manage to evade the body’s immune system.

The answer is that tumors activate brakes on the immune system, preventing it from attacking them. Keytruda is the first drug approved that inhibits the action of one of those brakes, a protein known as PD-1, or programmed death receptor 1.

At precent, Keytruda is only approved for patients who failed to respond to other melanoma drugs, such as Yervoy, and it costs ~ $12,500 per month or about $150,000 per year.  Some patients will be eligible for clinical trials.

 

Thoughts on Palliative Care

There was a fine article on palliative care in the Sunay Review of the NY Times, September 7, 2014.  Entitled "When It’s the Doctor Who Can’t Let Go" this is a good introduction to the field of palliative care and, as such, will be of help to physiaians and other health care professionals as well as to patients and their families.

"Palliative care itself suffers from an identity problem, in that many people equate palliation with hospice — i.e., end of life. This mistaken association can make a palliative care consultation feel like a death sentence to even the most open-minded clinicians, patients and family members. Striving for a cure is historically seen as a unique pathway that restores health; easing suffering is a separate, non-curative path that ends with the patient dying."

3Derm

is an innovtive company that has created a system for diagnosing skin lesions with a specal emphasis on melanoma. They have developed a handheld skin imager and intuitive cloud-based software to take, store, and send clinical quality 3D images from any user to a trained dermatologist. Their imager matches or exceeds industry standards in lighting, polarization, and magnification - ensuring that every image taken with a 3Derm device is diagnostically useful. The 3Derm web platform was built from the ground up to be HIPAA secure, and allows patients and dermatologists to connect easily with a modern interface. These innovations are designed to improve access to and frequency of standardized skin imaging - detecting skin cancer at the earlier, more treatable stages.  See 3Derm Website.

Cyclosporine

Cyclosporine is used with other medications to prevent transplant rejection (attack of the transplanted organ by the immune system of the person who received the organ) in people who have received kidney, liver, and heart transplants. Cyclosporine (modified) is also used alone or with methotrexate (Rheumatrex) to treat the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis (arthritis caused by swelling of the lining of the joints) in patients whose symptoms were not relieved by methotrexate alone. Cyclosporine (modified) is also used to treat psoriasis (a skin disease in which red, scaly patches form on some areas of the body) in certain patients who have not been helped by other treatments. Cyclosporine and cyclosporine (modified) are in a class of medications called immunosuppressants. They work by decreasing the activity of the immune system.

If you are considering taking cyclosporin, please read this information from the National Library of Medicine.