Personalized dermatology treatments at Apollo Dermatology
If you have ever looked up a skin condition online, you have probably seen a list of treatment options. Sometimes there are two. Sometimes there are eight. The list usually reads like a menu, as though any item on it would do the job about as well as any other.
That is not quite how medicine works, and I think it is worth explaining why.
A list of options is not a ranking
When a condition has five approved treatments, it does not mean there are five equally good answers waiting for you. It means researchers have found five approaches that work for some group of people under some set of circumstances. What the list cannot tell you is which of those circumstances match yours.
Take a basal cell skin cancer on the face. Depending on the situation, the reasonable options might include Mohs surgery, a standard excision, scraping and burning the site, radiation, or in select cases a topical cream. All of these are real treatments used by real dermatologists every day. But for a specific tumor, on a specific part of the face, in a specific patient, they are not interchangeable. One may offer the highest cure rate with the smallest scar. Another may spare someone a longer procedure they would struggle to sit through. Another may be a poor fit entirely.
The same is true across dermatology. Acne, psoriasis, eczema, and hair loss all have long lists of treatments, and in every case the list is a starting point rather than an answer.
What actually goes into the decision
The interesting part of the visit is not naming the options. It is figuring out which one fits you. That means thinking about things like:
How the condition is behaving on your skin, not on average
Where it is located and what that area does for you day to day
Your other medical conditions and the medications you already take
Whether you can tolerate downtime, and how much
How you feel about scars, needles, creams, office visits, and cost
What has already been tried, and how your skin responded
What matters most to you about the outcome
Two people can walk in with the same diagnosis and walk out with different plans, and both plans can be correct. A retired patient who has time for daily wound care may reasonably choose something very different from a teacher heading into the first week of school. Neither one got the lesser treatment. They got the right one.
Why reading online can lead you sideways
I want to be careful here, because I am not saying stay off the internet. Patients who read and ask questions are a pleasure to work with, and being informed makes our conversation better, not worse.
The trouble is that an article cannot examine you. It does not know the size or depth or borders of what you have. It does not know your history. So when someone reads about a treatment and arrives convinced it is the one, or convinced that a different one is unsafe, the conclusion is built on information that was never about them in the first place. Sometimes that leads to declining something that would have worked beautifully. Sometimes it leads to weeks of trying something that was never likely to help.
What a visit adds
A board certified dermatologist spends years learning to weigh these tradeoffs, and honestly, a lot of that learning comes from seeing how thousands of individual people respond. That experience does not make the decision for you. It gives us a better conversation to have together.
In practice, most visits go something like this. I look at the skin and explain what I am seeing. I lay out the reasonable options, including the ones I would not choose and why. You tell me what matters to you and what you are worried about. We pick together. If the first choice does not work out, we adjust, which is a normal part of the process rather than a failure.
So bring your questions. Bring the article you read. Bring the treatment you are curious about. That is all useful. Just let it be the start of the conversation rather than the end of it.
If something on your skin has been bothering you, or you have been weighing options on your own for a while, we are happy to see you at Apollo Dermatology in Rochester Hills.
Arjun Dupati, MD, FAAD
Apollo Dermatology
Call us at 248-436-4888 to schedule an appointment with Dr. Arjun Dupati.
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📍 Apollo Dermatology | Rochester HIlls, Michigan
By Dr. Arjun Dupati, Board-Certified Dermatologist and Fellowship-Trained Mohs Surgeon
