Medical Student Clerkship

MEDECK 604/616
Clinical Dermatology Course Overview

During this rotation, some of you will be working in dermatology clinics only, and some of you will have an inpatient consult service experience in addition. In either case, we hope that you will use this time to learn a basic approach to the diagnosis and management of the 20 or so most common skin problems that you will encounter in your clinical practice. Additionally, you should learn the principles and practice of topical therapy with wet dressings, steroids, emollients and antipruritic therapy. You should also learn to recognize major life-threatening skin diseases and skin markers of systemic disease. Finally, you should all learn and become facile with dermatologic vocabulary in order to generate clinical differential diagnoses and so that you can accurately describe a rash or a lesion to a dermatologist when requesting their consultative services in the future.

Rotation Sites

There are five different site assignments for the MEDECK 604 Clerkship. For site descriptions and sample schedules, click here.

You are expected to attend all scheduled events unless excused by a faculty member. This applies even if you have residency interviews to attend. Please let us know as soon as possible if you anticipate an absence as we need to adjust the clinics accordingly. Please do not schedule personal appointments during clinics. Thank you.

Clinical Responsibilities

You will be seeing patients, so please dress appropriately. Please wear clean white jackets, a name tag, and appear well-groomed in the clinics and on ward rounds. In the clinics, take as much primary responsibility as you can. You will be expected to work up at least one new case per clinic session.

Texts

We suggest two textbooks, ”Clinical Dermatology” by Thomas Habif, which is optional, and “Fitzpatrick’s Color Atlas & Synopsis of Clinical Dermatology” by Wolff and Johnson, which is required during your Dermatology rotation. Both are available for loan starting on the first day of the rotation, and you can check them out from Heather Bottomley in the Dermatology Academic Office, located in BB1353. Books are due back no later than the last day of the rotation.

Evaluations

Evaluation forms will be done on-line. It is mandatory that you fill them out: We can only improve by knowing what could be done better. If things are not going well mid-rotation for any reason, come and speak to one of us and we’ll try to improve things for you.