Jason Schairer, MD, on Extraintestinal Manifestations of IBD
Dr Schairer discusses his presentation at the AIBD regional meeting in Detroit on identifying and treating extraintestinal manifestations of IBD from joint pain to skin lesions, including the importance of working in a multidisciplinary team with other specialists.
Jason Schairer, MD, is director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at Henry Ford Health in Detroit, Michigan.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi everyone. My name is Jason Schairer. I'm the director of IBD at Henry Ford Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center in Detroit, Michigan. Today, I am spending my day at the AIBD regional meeting, and it is a great time. It has everything I love about AIBD, which is the very practical information that when I bring it back to my clinic, I can start helping people right away, but in a much more intimate atmosphere where I can sit and talk with people, I can hear their questions, we can share experiences and learn together.
Today's talk was about extraintestinal manifestations of IBD and really some key takeaway points I want to give to people. The first and foremost is that this affects a lot of our patients, and we're not expecting anyone to do a slit lamp examination. We're not expecting anybody to prescribe some of these medications that are outside our spectrum. But our patients are going all over the city to urgent care, to family practice, to doctors who just don't specialize in these conditions, and they're getting sometimes incorrect therapies.
So if we can spend a few minutes doing a better job of recognizing things in our clinics and then really picking out the specialists to send them to who help us, that's a meaningful improvement for our patients. What I tell you about in your office, how to help out, the first is to think locally and then think systemically. Locally, what am I seeing for the complaint the patient is talking about, whether it be an arthritis or a rash or an eye problem? And systemically, is this associated with IBD activity because that's the one that I'm fairly decent in helping out with in terms of treatment?
We also think locally and systemically, sometimes we need to affect topical therapy with medications or just better wound care, as in the case of pyoderma. Sometimes we need to treat systemically with better IBD medication usage. But the point is that we can coordinate with our specialists and get people on the right medications quickly delivering superior outcomes.
So I just think this is a great conference and if you ever have a chance to come by, it's very meaningful for our patients when we come back to clinic and help them live their best lives.
