Guest: Douglas DiRuggiero 

Corticosteroids remain one of dermatology’s most reliable workhorses, but good stewardship isn’t about putting the horse out to pasture. It’s about knowing when to ride, when to rein it in, and, perhaps most importantly, who is keeping track of the miles (analogy chosen purposefully). In this installment of the JDD Podcast Corticosteroid Stewardship Series, host Dr. Adam Friedman sits down with nationally recognized dermatology PA, educator, and author Douglas DiRuggiero to move stewardship from statement to standard of care. Together, they tackle what thoughtful corticosteroid prescribing actually looks like in the real world: potency, duration, body surface area, cumulative exposure, monitoring, steroid phobia, and the increasingly complicated question of what happens when several clinicians are each prescribing one piece of the corticosteroid pie. They also dig into the APP perspective, including how we teach the next generation of clinicians to use corticosteroids confidently without letting familiarity become complacency. Because corticosteroid stewardship isn’t corticosteroid avoidance… one more time, corticosteroid stewardship isn’t corticosteroid avoidance. It’s making the right choice, for the right patient, for the right amount of time, while remembering that somebody needs to keep the scorecard.