Guest: Dr. Oh Tae

For too long, the therapeutic ladder in hidradenitis suppurativa has often looked less like a ladder and more like an uneven mound: try this, fail that, wait, escalate, repeat. But while we are waiting, HS certainly isn’t. Inflammation marches on, tunnels form, scars accumulate, and what was potentially preventable disease becomes permanent architectural damage. So perhaps the better question isn’t when has the patient failed enough to earn advanced therapy, but rather when do we have enough evidence to justify waiting? JDD Podcast host Dr. Adam Friedman is joined by Dr. Tae Oh, Head of Medical Affairs for Dermatology in the US at UCB, to challenge the conventional “save it for later” mentality and examine how our evolving understanding of HS pathogenesis should reshape the treatment paradigm.

Tune in as they go beyond the bottle to explore industry’s role moving past the molecule. Can therapeutic development help expose the true prevalence and burden of an underrecognized disease? What responsibilities do industry partners have in disease awareness, education, evidence generation, patient identification, and ultimately defining not simply whether a therapy works, but when it should be used? Then it’s down to the follicular unit. Drs. Friedman and Oh dig into what our evolving understanding of HS initiation and propagation means at the bedside. If inflammation ultimately contributes to irreversible tunnels, scarring, pain, and disfigurement, is there a window of opportunity when earlier intervention could alter the trajectory before inflammatory disease becomes structural disease? And finally, the uncomfortable question…Are we making patients fail their way toward effective treatment? From therapeutic inertia and payer barriers to biologics, procedures, disease modification, and the consequences of undertreatment, this episode challenges one of medicine’s most persistent assumptions, that doing less first is inherently safer or smarter.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dCv7GcWoZIPl7TrxT_yliy5oE5zBRp2G/view?usp=sharing