How to Perform a Veterinary Dermatology Workup

I’m sure as many of you know, I’ve done quite a few webinars now on veterinary dermatology, on atopy, pruritus, on pyoderma and food allergy, on dermatophytosis. And to some degree what I’m hoping to do – and please let me know whether I’ve been successful or not at the end of it – is to try and distill how to perform a dermatology workup and improve treatment and diagnostic success. So I feel that the big thing with veterinary dermatology, which I have that perhaps people in practice don’t always have, is time. I have that great luxury that I have at least half an hour with referral cases that come in to me. And this really does help in improving my success rates. A

nd I’m very aware that this is not a luxury that everybody has. So what I’d like to do is really to start off by giving you some examples of some of the cases that I have seen, and how I’ve approached them And then moving on to the history-taking, which I think is just so important with a dermatological examination – and in fact any workup of a medical case or whatever – you know, the history is so important; then moving on to talk a little bit about the clinical examination. And then I’ve put together quite an exhaustive group of pictures to show you the different types of lesions that you may see. I do apologize if this looks very basic. I know when I qualified twenty years ago I came out into practice and really didn’t know what I was looking at on the skin for the first couple of years. And I decided I best do something about it. So hopefully that will be a help. If it seems very basic, I apologize.

I wanted to then discuss the diagnostic tests that I use in veterinary dermatology. Obviously, by the time I’ve done the clinical examination and before I start the diagnostic tests, I’m trying to put together in my own mind’s eye the potential diagnoses. And that’s going to then make me decide which is the test that I’m going to do next. No veterinarydermatology article is going to be complete without talking about steroids. So we will talk a little bit about those. And I very often get asked by people who want to refer a case, When should I refer it to you? Do you want it off steroids before it comes? What do you want to happen? So I thought I would spend a little bit of time talking about that. Then we’re very fortunate, I think, to have two of the pathologists from Abbey Veterinary Services, Lucy Oldroyd and Richard Fox writing little bit about skin biopsying.