Ethical issues in inpatient consultative dermatology.

Ethical issues commonly arise in inpatient dermatology consultations. We describe the case of an inpatient suffering from a severe, undiagnosable skin condition that raises key principles of medical ethics. The four principles include autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence, and justice.

Cutaneous community-acquired and hospital-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

The clinical presentation of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection ranges from asymptomatic colonization to cutaneous and invasive involvement. This review discusses the cutaneous presentations of community-acquired MRSA (CA-MRSA) and hospital-acquired MRSA (HA-MRSA) that one may encounter in the hospital or outpatient setting. Cutaneous CA-MRSA and HA-MRSA are often clinically indistinguishable, although they have different epidemiologic profiles and virulence factors.

Medical school dermatology curriculum: are we adequately preparing primary care physicians?

Background: There is a lack of information regarding the dermatology learning needs of primary care physicians and residents.

Objective: To determine dermatologic topics that primary care physicians consider important and to determine primary care residents' ratings of the teaching adequacy of these topics in the undergraduate medical curriculum.

Methods: Primary care physicians and residents were surveyed regarding the importance and teaching adequacy of 17 dermatologic content areas.

Skin findings in palliative care patients.

The prevalence of dermatologic disease and its effect on quality of life has not been well studied in patients with advanced illness. We sought to describe skin findings in inpatient palliative care patients and determine how often they are addressed by the primary or palliative care teams. We collected patient demographic and clinical data from the medical record, performed total body skin examinations, and determined how often significant cutaneous findings were documented in the chart.

Intracellular domains of a rat brain GABA transporter that govern transport.

Plasma membrane neurotransmitter transporters determine in part the concentration, time course, and diffusion of extracellular transmitter. Much has been learned about how substrate translocation through the transporter occurs; however, the precise way in which transporter structure maps onto transporter function has not yet been fully elucidated. Here, biochemical and electrophysiological approaches were used to test the hypothesis that intracellular domains of the rat brain GABA transporter (GAT1) contribute to the transport process.