DermCare Experts

06/04/2026

Our team is learning the latest at NYU’s 46th Annual Advances in Dermatology!

05/05/2026

Watch out.

She walked into a place that called itself a medical spa. Three months later she was still in the hospital, and the prosecutor told her: you went there of your own volition. What did you expect.

The person who almost killed her had no medical training. She had ordered the product off Alibaba. It was contaminated with mycobacterium. She had no malpractice insurance. She had no license to lose. No prosecutor would touch the case. No lawyer would take the civil suit, because there was no money to recover.

That is the aesthetics industry in 2026. It is a 20 billion dollar business. As big as the NFL. And almost nobody is checking who is holding the needle.

Last year, people in 11 states landed in hospitals from fake Botox ordered off the internet. A woman in Texas died at an IV bar when an unlicensed person hung potassium and ran it into her arm like a martini order. There were HIV cases out of an unlicensed spa in New Mexico. None of this is fringe. This is happening in strip malls and hair salons and weekend pop-ups in every state in the country.

And the people doing it often have no idea they are practicing medicine without a license. They took a two-day course. The course promised them a medical director on paper. Now they are independently injecting strangers' faces with whatever they could order online.

Kate Dee is a board-certified radiologist who left breast imaging for aesthetics ten years ago and watched the industry explode around her. She wrote a book called "Med Spa Mayhem" because she could not keep quiet about what she was seeing in her own field. The way she puts it: physicians worry about losing their license if they do something wrong. If you don't have a license, you don't have one to lose.

So here is what to ask before anyone touches your face, your skin, or puts a needle in your arm. Who am I seeing today, and what is their license. Who is the medical director, and can I see them. Is the person holding the needle qualified to do a good faith exam. If the answer is "an RN comes by once a month," walk out.

Send this to the friend who just booked Botox at a place she found scrolling Instagram. Send it to your sister who keeps mentioning the IV bar that opened next to her gym. Send it to anyone you love who walks into a "medical spa" assuming the word medical means something there.

Listen to the full conversation on The Podcast by KevinMD. Link in the comments.

What is the most concerning thing you have seen or heard about a med spa or IV bar in your community.

05/04/2026

The famous 1987 photograph shows Polish cardiac surgeon Dr. Zbigniew Religa inside an operating room after an extremely long heart transplant procedure. The image became iconic because it captures the physical and emotional exhaustion behind major surgery, with Religa still watching over the patient while another medical team member sleeps in the corner.

Religa was one of Poland’s most important heart-surgery pioneers. He led the team that performed Poland’s first successful heart transplant in 1985, a milestone that helped modernize cardiac medicine and transplant surgery in the country.

The 1987 operation is widely described as lasting about 23 hours, showing how demanding early transplant procedures could be during that era. The photograph is commonly credited to James Stanfield of National Geographic and is remembered as one of the most powerful medical images of the 20th century.

Many online versions connect the story to patient Tadeusz Żytkiewicz, who reportedly lived for about 30 years after receiving a transplanted heart. Some later accounts note debate over whether the patient in this exact photograph was Żytkiewicz, but the broader story remains tied to Religa’s pioneering transplant work and the extreme dedication of surgical teams.

The image is powerful because it does not glamorize medicine. It shows the human cost of life-saving work: long hours, exhaustion, stress, and the quiet responsibility of staying alert even after the surgery is over.

05/03/2026

Disgustingly shameful

A 47 year old woman asked for an MRI. By the time her insurance company let her have one, she had a sarcoma in her hip, and it was too late to save her leg.

Her doctor had already done the X-ray. He had already examined her. He had already sent her for physical therapy, the six weeks the insurance company's own published criteria said she needed to do before an MRI was on the table. There was no improvement. He told her she needed the scan.

The insurance company said it was not medically necessary, until she finished six weeks of physical therapy. She had finished it. They had paid for it. He appealed.

It took 38 days for the insurance company to reverse itself.

When she finally got the MRI, the cancer was already advanced. The doctors at the hospital told her that if she had come a month sooner, they could have treated it with chemotherapy alone. Instead, they amputated her leg, her hip, and her pelvis. She died two years later.

Her family sued. The federal judge who heard the case called it tragic, then threw it out, because no law in New York holds an insurance company accountable when it gives medical advice that turns out to be wrong. Doctors are accountable. Nurses are accountable. Hospitals are accountable. Insurance companies are not.

By law, the person reviewing a prior authorization denial is supposed to be a doctor in the relevant specialty. The federal inspector general found that very often, they are not. A pediatrician can deny a radiology request. A reviewer with no oncology background can decide a hip MRI is not medically necessary. The criteria the insurer publishes are not always the criteria the insurer follows.

Attorney Steve Cohen argued this case before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The American Medical Association, the New York State medical society, and the Vermont and Connecticut medical societies all filed friend of the court briefs supporting the family. The argument was simple. If you give medical advice, you are accountable for it.

This is not just a story about one woman. The American Medical Association has surveyed physicians for years. The overwhelming majority say prior authorization has caused real harm to their patients. Many spend 10, 15, 20 hours a week of staff time chasing approvals and appealing denials.

Send this to anyone who has ever been told no by their insurance company and wondered who actually decided.

Listen to the full conversation on The Podcast by KevinMD. Link in the comments.

What is the worst insurance denial you or someone you love has ever lived through?

05/03/2026

Overcoming tremendous odds - and dispelling the shame surrounding mental illness.

She was strapped to a metal bed with thick leather restraints while studying constitutional law at Yale.

The doctors told Elyn Saks she would never live independently again. The diagnosis was chronic schizophrenia. The prognosis was institutionalization.

She refused to accept their verdict on her life.

Elyn Saks grew up with a brilliant, analytical mind that was also haunted by voices. The voices told her she was evil. They told her buildings were collapsing. She hid the terror behind intense academic rigor. By the time she reached Yale Law School in the 1980s, the breaks were visible. During an acute episode in New Haven, she was forcibly hospitalized. She lay restrained for days while learning about fundamental rights she no longer possessed.

The medical system of that era viewed severe mental illness as a final sentence. A patient with her diagnosis was expected to work a menial job, take heavy medication, and stay quietly out of sight. The doctors told her to drop out of law school. They said a high-stress legal career was impossible.

She looked at the institutional walls closing in and chose to fight instead. She returned to her classes. She took her medication. She attended therapy five days a week. She sat in the law library studying while actively fighting off visual hallucinations. She once spent an entire afternoon hiding behind a bookshelf because she believed the legal texts were broadcasting her thoughts to the room.

She graduated. She moved to Los Angeles. She built a career at the University of Southern California as an expert in mental health law. She published complex papers. She won tenure. But she lived in constant fear that if the university knew her diagnosis, her credibility would vanish. The stigma acted as an invisible wall, thicker than the leather straps that once held her down.

The silence exhausted her. She was living two lives. By day she was Professor Saks. By night she managed a brain that constantly threatened to betray her.

In 2007, she made a decision that terrified the few colleagues who knew the truth. She wrote a memoir called The Center Cannot Hold. She put her chronic schizophrenia on the cover. She detailed the hallucinations, the forced hospitalizations, and the deep terror of losing her mind.

She expected to lose her job. She expected her students to walk out. Instead, the wall cracked. The medical establishment had to reckon with a brilliant legal scholar who had the exact diagnosis they usually wrote off as hopeless.

She began traveling the country. She stood in front of psychiatric boards and medical directors. She told them patients require agency, not just physical containment. She showed them what a person with severe mental illness looks like when given support instead of straps.

A diagnosis is not a boundary on a human life.

Elyn Saks did not cure her schizophrenia. She still experiences hallucinations. She still attends therapy. She simply stopped letting the system dictate what those facts meant about her future.

Today she directs the Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy, and Ethics at USC. She changed how the law views the physical autonomy of psychiatric patients. The leather restraints that once held her are slowly being phased out of hospitals. The textbooks that said people with her condition could never live independently are being rewritten.

Somebody in your family probably hides a struggle because they are afraid of what the world will think. Elyn Saks spent decades hiding hers. Then she wrote it down, spoke it out loud, and used her voice to help others.

She did not become extraordinary despite her illness. She became extraordinary by refusing to let it define the limits of her life.

The girl strapped to a hospital bed in New Haven grew up to teach future lawyers how to protect the rights of patients just like her. She turned her pain into policy. She turned her silence into advocacy.

And she proved that the center can hold — if you refuse to let anyone else decide where the edges are.

05/03/2026

She ushered in the antibiotic age….

She wasn't supposed to change history.

Mary Hunt was just a lab technician in Peoria, Illinois. No fancy degrees. No famous discoveries. No spotlight following her around.

But World War II was raging. Soldiers were dying from infections that bullets couldn't kill. And penicillin - the miracle drug everyone knew about - existed in amounts so tiny it might as well have been fairy dust.

The scientists at Mary's lab were desperate. They had Alexander Fleming's discovery from 1928. They knew penicillin could save lives. But they couldn't make enough of it to matter.

That's where Mary came in.

While the famous doctors worked in sterile labs, Mary did something different. Something the textbooks never mention.

She went shopping for garbage.

Every morning, she walked through Peoria's markets and grocery stores. Not looking for fresh fruit. Looking for the rotting stuff. The bruised peaches nobody wanted. The soft pears heading for the trash. The forgotten grapes covered in fuzzy mold.

She'd buy them for pennies. Carry them back to the lab like treasure. Study every speck of mold under her microscope.

Most of the time, nothing happened.

The molds she found were weak. They produced tiny amounts of penicillin - not nearly enough to help the dying soldiers overseas.

But Mary kept looking.

Then came that summer day in 1943.

She walked into a local produce market and saw it sitting there. A cantaloupe with a golden patch of mold spread across its skin like velvet.

Something about it caught her eye. The way it grew. The color. The texture.

She bought it for a few cents and hurried back to the lab.

The scientists sliced it open. Isolated the mold. Put it in a culture dish. And waited.

When the results came back, nobody could believe it.

Mary's cantaloupe mold - later labeled NRRL 1951 - produced penicillin at rates they'd never seen before. Not just a little more. Dozens of times more than their best strain.

It was the breakthrough they'd been praying for.

That single moldy cantaloupe became the foundation for mass-producing penicillin. Factories across America started using Mary's strain. By D-Day in 1944, Allied soldiers had millions of doses.

Infections that once meant death became treatable. Wounded soldiers lived to come home. Children with pneumonia recovered. Mothers survived childbirth.

The antibiotic age had begun.

All because a quiet lab technician decided to look closely at something everyone else threw away.

But here's what breaks your heart.

The newspapers called her "Moldy Mary." Sometimes as a joke. Sometimes with respect. But mostly, they didn't call her anything at all.

Scientific papers rarely mentioned her name. She never got awards. Never gave speeches. Never stood on a stage while the world thanked her.

The famous scientists got the credit. The lab directors got the glory. The pharmaceutical companies got rich.

Mary Hunt just went back to work.

For decades, her story stayed buried in footnotes. Hidden in lab records. Forgotten by the world she helped save.

But think about this for a moment.

Every time antibiotics saved a life - which happened millions upon millions of times - it traced back to that summer day when Mary spotted something special on a cantaloupe's skin.

Every child who survived pneumonia. Every soldier who came home from war. Every person who lived because an infection didn't kill them.

They all owed their lives, in part, to a woman walking through a produce market with curious eyes and a caring heart.

Mary Hunt didn't discover penicillin. Alexander Fleming did that.

She didn't invent the fermentation process. Teams of scientists figured that out.

But she found the missing piece. The key that unlocked everything else.

And she found it not through luck or accident, but through persistence. Through caring enough to look closely at things other people ignored.

That's the kind of hero the world needs to remember.

Not the loudest voice in the room. Not the person with the biggest ego or the fanciest title.

But the quiet one who shows up every day. Who pays attention. Who sees possibility where others see waste.

Who walks into a market looking for spoiled fruit and walks out holding the future of medicine.

Mary Hunt saved millions of lives with a moldy cantaloupe and a heart that refused to give up.

The world owes her everything. And it's about time we said so.


~Forgotten Stories