Yosipovitch on itch clinics

Last Thursday I spoke to Gil Yosipovitch, an eminent dermatologist and itch expert at Wake Forest University. I called him because Martin Steinhoff said Yosipovitch ran the only itch clinic in the United States, and I wanted to learn how such a clinic operates.

The only problem: Yosipovitch does not run an itch clinic. There are NO itch clinics in the United States. "I very much believe it's the future and there should be many of them," he says. He's happy that Steinhoff is establishing one. The centers in Germany are the model; apparently a colleague is also starting one in Singapore.

Y believes there are a couple barriers to itch clinics getting started in the US. The major one is insurance companies and the current system for reimbursement; doctors have much more incentive to do basic treatment like wart removal than they do to care for patients with chronic conditions who require regular monitoring. Also, he says, to establish a clinic, a department chair (at a hospital or university) has to put money into it. That means leadership, and no-one except for Steinhoff has shown that leadership.

Y says that he likes Steinhoff's plan of directing a clinic with a number of resident doctors and a nurse practitioner who keeps in touch with patients through an online forum. In fact, Y himself once ran such a forum, called "Living with Itch" (if I understand correctly, it got folded into the International Forum for the Study of Itch website, but I can't find a link to old postings). The problem was that the site, on which patients shared their "anguish, frustration, and practical ideas," was quickly "hacked," in Y's words--possibly not hacked, but overwhelmed with spam from quacks advertising miracle cures like some garlic diet. So the forum became useless and was abandoned. Y thinks an online patient forum could work if someone was dedicated to the web technology side, and ensuring that only authorized patients could use it. (Also, there are "HIPAA," or medical privacy, issues, he says; presumably his former site managed to solve them.)

A point Y insisted on making was that itch should be treated as a disease, not a symptom. It's a major issue. He sees many parallels between itch and pain; itch is now where chronic pain was thirty years ago.

Y also thinks that eczema patients should look to psoriasis as a disease whose patients have been successful in setting up support groups and activism for funding. "But [itch clinics] needsencouragement from the upper levels," he says, meaning the NIH and legislators who have the power to make insurance companies change the incentive model.

Y is a fan of the National Eczema Association. "They're providing a lot of support to atopics," he says. He was able to leverage a small NEA grant into a large NIH one (that's how science funding works--a granting agency will only give you money if someone else has already given you money). I suppose I should be happy that he likes the NEA. He said he only decided to talk to me because I was raising money for them.

In my next post I'll talk about Y's position on alternative medicine. My next post, by the way, may be my last for some time. I need to resolve this trouble I've been having with my neck, and the less time I spend at a computer the better, for the moment.