Why there are no patients in this gallery
Nobody who has been treated here appears anywhere on this website. The condition pages carry illustrative images of typical presentations, each labelled as an illustration, and that is a different thing from publishing a patient: a person who came to this practice did not consent to being an advertisement for it, and consent obtained at the moment somebody is worried about their skin is not worth much.
There are also no before-and-after pairs, anywhere, and there never will be. Nearly every condition treated here fluctuates on its own — photograph any relapsing skin disease at its worst and again at its best and you have a persuasive pair of images that demonstrates nothing at all about the treatment in between. One image describing a condition is a description. Two images of the same area is a claim, and it is a claim this speciality cannot support.
So this gallery is rooms, instruments, materials and light. What a dermatology practice looks like from the inside is a reasonable thing to want to see before you walk into one.
No before-and-after photographs, and no promised outcome. There are no before-and-after photographs on this website and there never will be. Every set you have seen somewhere else was chosen from a much larger pile, and the second picture is usually taken in different light, at a different angle, at a different point in a flare cycle. In dermatology the dishonesty is sharper than in most fields, because nearly every condition here fluctuates on its own — photograph any relapsing skin disease at its worst and again at its best and you have a persuasive pair of images that demonstrates nothing about the treatment in between. What we publish instead is what a treatment typically achieves, in how long, in what proportion of people, and how often it does not work.
Nothing is diagnosed from a photograph. We do not diagnose skin from photographs, and we do not answer "what is this?" by email, by message or through a form. This is not caution for its own sake. A photograph has no history attached to it, cannot be felt, cannot be stretched or pressed to see whether the colour blanches, cannot be examined under a dermatoscope, and misreports colour badly — which matters enormously on skin that is not pale. The examination that actually distinguishes a harmless growth from an early cancer involves magnification, cross-polarised light and, when there is any doubt at all, a biopsy. An application that offers to tell you whether a mole is dangerous from a picture taken on a telephone is selling reassurance, and reassurance is the one product in this field that is dangerous when it is wrong. Bring the mark to a room where somebody can look at it.
A named diagnosis and a written plan you leave holding
Book an appointment
Pick a physician and a time from the calendar — it shows only the hours each of them genuinely has free. A new patient appointment is thirty minutes, a full skin examination forty-five, and you leave with a named diagnosis written down. If something on your skin has changed, telephone instead and say that word: it is triaged differently.