Treating Autoimmune Skin Diseases at University of Utah Health Dermatology

Autoimmune skin diseases cannot be cured, but we can help manage flare-ups with treatment. University of Utah Health Dermatology offers a specialty autoimmune clinic where multiple board-certified dermatologists offer extensive evaluation and treatment for patients with autoimmune conditions that affect their skin. Video Transcript Below Dr. Hansen: To understand autoimmune disease, you have to understand the immune system. So the immune system, it normally functions to get rid of things that would harm our body. That process normally works very efficiently and effectively, but in some people, unfortunately, their immune system goes slightly haywire, and rather than just killing bacteria and viruses, the immune system then starts to attack our own tissues and different organs, and one of those organs where that happens fairly commonly is the skin. Dr. Clarke: There's a lot we don't understand about autoimmune diseases. It's really frustrating for our patients and it's frustrating for us. Dr. Rhoads: It's really hard to get the full breadth of what patients are dealing with and it can be hard too for a new patient to get that vulnerable with someone that they've just met. And so I try my best to draw out from patients what they're looking for from their treatment. Dr. Hansen: One of the overarching missions of this department is to care for any patient at any age that comes in with a particular skin problem and to be able to have experts that are familiar with their particular problem and to use a team approach to help them. Dr. Clarke: We are so fortunate to have a large faculty with an incredible depth of expertise and breadth of expertise. Dr. Rhoads: I know that we bring to the table what a lot of people in the community aren't able to bring because they're small groups. Dr. Clarke: And it's a department that really supports investigation and innovation. And we take care of people from so many different regions. Dr. Hansen: These are patients that come because they have a particular problem that needs specialty care. When patients come in, we like to share those patients with all the providers. And so we'll pause and we'll gather together and everyone will have a chance to look at the patient together and throw out some ideas and treatment ideas as well. And instead of just seeing one provider, you're seeing four or five providers sometimes, so that's really helpful. Dr. Clarke: We provide compassionate, collaborative care, and that means that we collaborate as clinicians with one another, but we collaborate with our patients. We listen to them. We involve them in treatment decisions. Dr. Rhoads: I work right next to other autoimmune specialists, and so if I see someone with a challenging case, I just grab them from across the hall and they come poke their head in and give me their thoughts. And it's fantastic to have that kind of brainpower. Dr. Hansen: Practitioners in general practice mainly see one or two of these types of cases throughout their career. But if you collect a number of those cases at one institution, you build up a body of knowledge about how to care for these types of patients. Dr. Rhoads: It feels really rewarding when people have traveled a long way and seen a lot of other doctors and then finally I'm able to provide them with their diagnosis or offer treatment options that they weren't able to get previously. It's important to find a doctor that understands your disease and has treated patients with that before so they can kind of anticipate what bumps may occur along the road in regards to treatment and better understand all the options that are available. Dr. Hansen: In virtually all cases, there's something that hasn't been tried yet, and so there always should be hope that way, that there's something out there. When we get a patient that comes in with one of these difficult conditions that's really impacting their quality of life, it certainly takes extra time and a little extra work on my part, but when we do get improvement in their condition, there's nothing more satisfying, and that really is why we go into medicine. Dr. Clarke: Our degree of experience both with older medications and these newer medications really allows us to tailor our approach to treating patients better and to give them the medication that's going to be the best one for them as well as to be able to provide them access to clinical trials. We want people to have a quality of life that they enjoy. So when we have the opportunity to do that and give that to somebody, there's nothing more meaningful. And when people think of care at the University of Utah Dermatology, that's what they should know.