‘The Dermatology Eye’ – that’s what we call it. Otherwise known as visual literacy, it’s the ability dermatologists have to be able to look at a rash or lesion and seemingly instantly identify the diagnosis or underlying pathology. But it’s not magic or genius – everyone has a ‘dermatology eye’ - but it needs to be developed and worked on through experience and purposeful practice. We are often reminded that there are over 2,000 skin diseases known to man but only a handful of them are seen in day to day clinical practice. Rare conditions – like erythema gyratum repens or harlequin ichthyosis – could potentially never be seen by many dermatologists. Therefore, we rely heavily on case reports and expensive, well-illustrated textbooks to learn about conditions that we potentially may never come across. So developing a dermatology eye can be much more challenging than just spending a few years as a registrar; it can literally take decades.

And that’s the beauty of MedShr: it is a gateway to purposeful practice via the global sharing of images and cases. If you want to develop your own visual literacy – your ‘dermatology eye’ – then go to MedShr and start practicing. And share your weird and wonderful ‘once in a career, never to be seen again’ cases with the MedShr community. It’s quicker and easier than writing up a case in a journal, and will probably reach a much larger audience considering that the MedShr community is growing rapidly every day. And you get immediate feedback from colleagues when you stumble across something truly rare or a variation of something more common that you haven’t seen before. So, when you see it, MedShr it – and develop your dermatology eye quicker than you thought possible. Join Dr Spierings in MedShr’s Dermatology Group! Check out some of the latest cases in Dermatology: