Hi guys, welcome back to Skincare at NRP. This is my host, Ethel. And today's guest is a very, very special guest. I truly look up to her as a medical professional, she is genuinely a leader in medicine.

And then she is a visionary and a pioneer in dermatology. She is actually a New York City board certified dermatologist. She is a leading, published author in medical journals and an expert in skin cancers.

So without further ado, I want to introduce you guys to Dr. Orrit Markowitz. She has also Dr. Markowitz has also published a recent study that is now, you know, dubbing her method and her new technology as the Markowitz method.

So, you know, I think you guys are going to learn a lot from this episode. I know I am. So without further ado, I want to welcome you, Dr. Markowitz. Thank you so much for your time and for your willingness to come on the show. I am just so honored to host you.

Markowitz, I want to begin by your background and your background and medicine and just how you got involved in, you know, dermatology and all the, all the stuff that led to this.

Sure. So where to begin. I completed my dermatology residency back in the early 2000s and prior to medical school, I've always had an interest in sort of visual science.

And actually my undergraduate degree was in psychology and I ended up writing my thesis in the field of perception on something called the moon illusion.

Yeah. And so, which, you know, there are many theories and fields of perceptual visual science that begin with certain illusions like the moon illusion, where the moon at the zenith looks smaller than the moon at the horizon, when in fact the distance is the same and why does that occur.

The reason I bring that up is because I've always kind of had an interest in understanding how we perceive things and when I went into medical school, it easily became very clear that I had a real interest in the largest organ on the body, the skin and sort of how we further understand looking at our skin.

And early in my career, I ended up focusing on non invasive imaging, different ways to visualize the skin and ended up sort of doing a fellowship in the field of skin cancer, which at the time was really where we were utilizing a lot of these early imaging techniques beginning with dermoscopy, which I ended up writing a textbook in and published.

Yes, and this is, this is just a handheld microscope that has different types of polarized lighting and it just, you know, gives information under the skin.

As I kind of finished my residency and finished the fellowship in skin cancer, I ended up joining the Mount Sinai Department of dermatology, as well as the Downstate Department of dermatology, where I completed my residency, I ended up leading in both locations, their pigmented lesions also known as melanoma and skin cancer divisions.

And at the same time, around that time, companies in England and Europe were developing technologies that went further than dermoscopy looking under the skin and these, you know, one of these devices, which I helped back then pioneer in the United States is called an optical coherence tomography device.

And this device was utilized in the ophthalmologic space and actually a standard of care when you go see your ophthalmologist that they're going to use this device to look into the eye to understand a lot of diseases.

It made sense for these companies to say, hey, why don't we start looking at other organs of the body and it, you know, the next organ that they sort of pursued with skin and I just happened to be early in my career leading, you know, skin cancer to major institutions in New York.

And ended up with these devices and at the same time, some publications were coming out with another device that I also was an early adapter of, but this technology was sort of

from its technology was progressed in Europe and then after that came to the US. So rather than call myself a pioneer, I call myself an early adapter of confocal microscopy, which is also a device that looks into the skin and is used sell like more of a cellular cross sectional imaging device that now we actually can do as a non cutting biopsy.

But then there wasn't really, you know, reimbursement for this. It wasn't really mainstream. It was only in a handful of people and OCT, I was the only one. And so when I ended up working with these two tools and medications at the same time were coming out and people were doing research to see, well, if someone has a basal cell, can I use a certain type of cream that I'm using first?

They're pre cancers and maybe it's going to help their skin cancer disappear. And so all of this research was happening back then.

And it just kind of made a lot of sense to me at the time I said, OK, people are looking at this, but they're not really using tools to look under the skin.

I have all these tools to look under the skin, starting with dermoscopy. Why don't I, you know, look at the same thing that they're doing, but really understand it using technology to get a really good visualization under the skin.

So that I can understand what's actually happening and whether the patients are really clearing or whether, you know, they're just kind of seem to be clearing.

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