Don't be fooled by look-alike skin diseases

摘要

All of us, at one lime or another, were probably guilty of treating one of our sarcoptic mange patients as an allergic patient. It is the perfect example of a patient with the same clinical appearance and symptoms of two diseases: atopy vs. sarcopticmange. The difficulty in treating most dermatological cases is, in fact, that the same disease can appear differently in different patients. Conversely, two patients that appear to have the same clinical appearance may, in fact, have two different diseases. There are many examples of this dilemma which we deal with daily, but probably the most serious look-alike diseases are bacterial pyoderma vs. cutaneous lymphoma and pemphigus foliaceus vs. bacterial or dermatophyte infections. (See Photos 1 and 3.)