Five Minutes With…Las Vegas Derm Faculty!
As we near the end of summer and enter what promises to be a busy fall and holiday season, MedscapeLIVE! would like to remind you we are here for all your CME needs.
First up to help you get your credits (up to 17!) is the 2026 Las Vegas Derm. A lot is happening in all the core fields in dermatology, and while that’s a great thing for patients, it presents a challenge for clinicians to keep current. Las Vegas Derm is the perfect meeting to get brought up to speed on advancements across the clinical dermatology spectrum, and you will leave being able to implement the best and most current care for your patients. From September 17 through 20, LVD faculty will cover it all. In fact, this month we speak with Drs. Tina Bhutani Jones and Lawrence Eichenfield about what to expect, so read on for the scoop. You can still register here!
If you can’t attend LVD, check out the upcoming Skin of Color Update, which is from October 9-11 in NYC. You can register here.
As mentioned, this month catch up with co-chairs of LVD, Dr. Tina Bhutani, Dr. Lawrence F. Eichenfield, Dr. Adam Friedman, and Dr. Vishal A. Patel, who candidly share their experience on various topics and treatment options. Read on to see what they say when the microphone is off!
Thank you to these thought leaders for sharing their perspectives. Please contact me at colleen@cmhadvisors.com with comments or suggestions, and thanks for reading!—Colleen Hutchinson
Five Minutes with Drs. Tina Bhutani, Lawrence F. Eichenfield, Adam Friedman, and Vishal A. Patel
Bios for Drs. Bhutani, Eichenfield, and Patel can be found here.
Dr. Tina Bhutani
You co-authored a J Clin Aesthet Dermatol article on psoriasis topical prescription therapy and limitations of guidelines and treatment selection, with updated recommendations. What’s the main takeaway for clinicians and what do you advise for implementation of recommendations?
Dr. Bhutani: The main takeaway is that topical therapy for psoriasis treatments has evolved over the last several years. We now have very effective and well tolerated non-steroidal alternatives and we should create practice patterns that utilize these options more. Topical steroids have always been our workhorse, and they continue to play a critical role in dermatology, but with newer alternatives we can easily limit the long-term use of steroids and prevent unnecessary side effects.
As Session Chair for Psoriasis and Other Papulosquamous Disease Forum, what do you anticipate attendees coming away with?
Dr. Bhutani: The psoriasis forum will focus on advances in psoriasis treatments, but we will also discuss best practices for treating complex psoriasis cases such as psoriasis in high impact sites and psoriasis in special populations. We are also excited to examine multidisciplinary care of psoriasis during our case-based “Psoriasis Beyond the Skin Panel.”
Dr. Lawrence Eichenfield
You co-authored a J Am Acad Dermatol article on periorificial dermatitis treatment, including skincare, topical, and systemic therapies, with updated recommendations. What are the main takeaways for practicing clinicians?
Dr. Eichenfield: Periorificial dermatitis is multifactorial in etiology and at times difficult to diagnose. Triggering factors vary as can disease course and duration, and identification, and elimination of potential external triggers is important, especially with corticosteroid exposure.
There are many therapies, and while there are no FDA-approved treatments, anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial agents usually “get the job done,” with topicals being the mainstay of treatment over a 1-2 month course.
There are some new reports of newer non-steroid topicals being useful in treatment, including ruxolitinib and roflumilast.
What do you anticipate attendees coming away with from the session Women & Children First, for which you serve as session chair and presenter:
Dr. Eichenfield: We will be discussing updates in vulvar dermatology, female alopecia, and multiple disease states in pediatric dermatology including vitiligo, pediatric alopecia, lichen sclerosus and some challenging infection cases, before moving on to discuss male alopecia and genital dermatology.
The Atopic Dermatitis, Other Eczematous and Pruritic Disorder Forum should be incredibly interesting, with Eric Simpson and Jonathan Zippin joining me to update us all on topical and systemic therapies for AD, contact dermatitis, and regional dermatitis- highlighting chronic hand dermatitis and facial eczemas. We will be working to stress the takeaways from new clinical studies into clinic, and working within our panels to distill best approaches to challenging eczema patients and issues.
Together with our case discussions, this should be a powerhouse session for state-of-the-art clinical management of common (and a few less common) conditions.
You co-authored this month’s Immunol Allergy Clin North Am article, Topical Therapy for Atopic Dermatitis: What is New and the New Paradigm. Can you share any pearls?
Dr. Eichenfield: Plenty new, as we absorb newer approvals of non-steroid medications in younger ages, and wait for further expansion of our armamentarium for treating our under-two-year-olds with AD. We are aware of heightened concerns with topical corticosteroids and now have to think through optimal use of our older tried and true therapies with newer agents, which can serve as substitutions or additions to our regimens of care.
What is the Meet the Masters Roundtable Discussion on LVD Day 2?
Dr. Eichenfield: It’s what our attendees bring to it, along with a time for us to talk about what we see happening as the “big moves” in dermatology in our advancing therapies and work to establish “best practices.” And, partly, it is Brian and I offering perspective on how we see future changes in the field fitting into our past and present experiences.
Dr. Adam Friedman
What do you anticipate attendees coming away with from these sessions and talks for which you serve as session chair and presenter?
Session: Medical Dermatology Case-Based Learnings
Dr. Friedman: The key phrase here is case-based. I don't want attendees walking away with a laundry list of drugs they could have found online. The goal is to put them in the driver's seat (F1 of course!): here's the patient, here's the problem, what are you going to do next? We are covering very bread and butter dermatology, including acne, rosacea, warts, molluscum and pediatric infections, but approaching those conditions through real clinical decision points. I want people leaving with practical algorithms, therapeutic pearls and, just as importantly, a better sense of what to do when Plan A doesn't behave like the textbook says it should. The measure of success is whether something from that session changes what you do in clinic Monday morning.
Male Alopecia: Scarring and Non-Scarring
Dr. Friedman: Hair loss in men gets reflexively translated into "male-pattern hair loss," and that's exactly the trap I want to address. Pattern recognition matters, but so does recognizing when inflammation, symptoms, perifollicular change or loss of follicular ostia should make you stop and think about a cicatricial process before irreversible damage occurs.
For androgenetic alopecia, we now have a much richer conversation around established therapies such as topical minoxidil and finasteride and evolving approaches including low-dose oral minoxidil and dutasteride, with the important caveat that not everything we use in practice carries an FDA indication for male androgenetic alopecia. A 2025 network meta-analysis, for example, found oral dutasteride 0.5 mg/day the most efficacious monotherapy examined, while finasteride 1 mg/day remains the FDA-approved oral standard.
But the larger message is: first determine what kind of hair loss you're treating. In non-scarring disease we are generally trying to preserve and enhance a viable follicle. In scarring alopecia, time is hair. Once that follicular unit is destroyed, no amount of therapeutic enthusiasm is bringing it back. The session is designed to sharpen that distinction and help clinicians intervene intelligently and earlier. The LVD program specifically places this talk within the broader "Women and Children First" hair and genital dermatology session, followed by challenging cases and panel discussion.
War on Warts/Molluscum Massacre
Dr. Friedman: These are conditions everybody treats, yet they can generate a disproportionate amount of therapeutic frustration. Warts are particularly humbling because we have a host of destructive, immune directed and predominantly off-label approaches but still no universally effective strategy. A systematic review of 62 randomized trials of intralesional wart therapies illustrates both the range of options and the enormous variability in response.
Molluscum, on the other hand, has undergone a legitimate therapeutic transformation. For years the conversation was essentially watchful waiting versus physically destroying lesions. We now have two FDA approved options with very different delivery models: clinician administered cantharidin 0.7% for patients age 2 and older and the nitric-oxide-releasing agent berdazimer 10.3%, applied at home for patients age 1 and older.
So my "war" and "massacre" are not about indiscriminately annihilating bumps. The objective is smarter warfare: know when to treat, understand what you're treating, select a therapy based on the patient and disease burden, and stop perpetuating treatments simply because "that's how we've always done it."
You co-authored this month’s Journal of Drugs in Dermatology article, Biologics for Pediatric Hidradenitis Suppurativa: An Update on the Evolving Therapeutic Landscape. Can you share any pearls from this article?
Dr. Friedman: The biggest pearl is that pediatric HS is not simply adult HS waiting for the patient to turn 18. Nearly half of adults with HS report disease onset between ages 10 and 21, yet pediatric HS remains underrecognized and pediatric patients have historically been underrepresented in clinical trials. That evidence gap matters because this is precisely the period when uncontrolled inflammation can begin laying down permanent tunnels, fibrosis and scars, while simultaneously affecting school, relationships, activity and quality of life.
The therapeutic landscape is finally changing. Adalimumab and secukinumab are now FDA approved for moderate-to-severe HS in adolescents 12 years and older. And the pipeline is moving: Bimekizumab is being formally studied in children and adolescents, while sonelokimab is also being evaluated in adolescents.
My practical takeaway is that we need to get rid of therapeutic nihilism in pediatric HS. Young does not mean mild, and early does not mean "wait." If the biology and disease burden justify advanced therapy, our goal should be preventing irreversible disease, not waiting for irreversible disease to prove that the patient was sick enough.
Can you tell us about the two Hands-On Workshops on LVD Day 1?
Dr. Friedman: This is one of my favorite parts of the meeting because dermatology is fundamentally a hands-on specialty, yet so much continuing education is necessarily delivered from behind a lectern.
We have two workshops on Thursday: a Wound Care Hands-On Workshop, which I am doing with Dr. Joshua Mervis, and "Nail Ed(u) It," which I am doing with Dr. Molly Hinshaw.
The philosophy is simple: knowing something and knowing how to do something are very different educational outcomes. Wound care is an area in which dermatologists manage wounds constantly but where practical education around products, dressings and therapeutic decision making can sometimes lag behind the clinical need. Nails present a similar challenge: small piece of real estate, enormous differential diagnosis, and plenty of opportunities to get yourself into trouble.
Rather than death by PowerPoint (though I do love me a good ppt) these workshops are designed around active learning and translating knowledge into usable clinical skills. Dermatology is a contact sport. Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty.
Dr. Vishal Patel
You co-authored this month’s JAMA Dermatol article, Consensus Guidelines for Staging and Surveillance Imaging in Cutaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma. What are the main takeaways for practicing clinicians?
Dr. Patel: The paper turns "consider imaging" into an actionable, risk-stratified framework — image once a tumor's nodal metastasis risk hits roughly 15% or higher, with CT as the workhorse — so clinicians can confidently justify who needs a scan and spare the majority who don't.
What do you anticipate attendees coming away with from these sessions for which you serve as session chair and presenter:
Sessions: Skin Cancer Forum/ Basal Cell Carcinoma Updates: I want attendees to leave with things they can apply the next week — and specifically to appreciate how dynamic BCC has become, from refining low-risk topical approaches to knowing when to reach for hedgehog inhibitors or immunotherapy and when to refer.
Access these critical CME conference opportunities here:
26th Annual Las Vegas Dermatology Seminar
September 17-20, 2026 | Las Vegas, NV: Bellagio Hotel
For more info, click here!
October 9-11, 2026 | New York, NY: New York Hilton Midtown
For more info, click here!
Dermatology Resource Section
JAMA Dermatology Opinion: Contextualizing the Global Dermatology Workforce
Cutis Original Commentary— The Role of Coconut Oil in Skin Care Explored
NEJM Editorial: Endovascular Therapy for Post-Thrombotic Syndrome — A Randomized Trial
MEDSCAPE MD-IQ QUIZ: Pediatric Atopic Dermatitis And Learning Disability
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