How to use Lupus to Interest Medical Students & Residents in Rheumatology
Lupus is a fascinating disease that can enrich your knowledge of internal medicine. I always tell medical students and residents that you can learn a lot of medicine from a patient with lupus because their complications are so diverse. When you’re comfortable assessing a patient with lupus, it makes you better in a whole lot of other aspects of medicine.
A lot of the clinical complications seen in lupus are not unique to lupus. Sometimes when a resident comes to the clinic, I can tell they’re not interested in rheumatology and are only here because they have no other choice. So I’ll ask what specialty interests them most.
If they say cardiology, I’ll say, “Let’s go through the cardiac manifestations of lupus.” If you get comfortable with all of the cardiac manifestations of lupus, it’s going to teach you different aspects of cardiology you’ll find interesting. Because a patient with lupus can get a pericardial effusion, I’ll ask, “What are the ECG manifestations of fluid around the heart?” If a resident learns that for lupus, they’ve learned it for all the other diseases that cause it.
If a resident tells me they’re interested in neurology, I let them know that lupus has 19 neuropsychiatric syndromes. So just by learning about what you need to know for lupus, it can extend to all different neurological diseases that may truly interest you.
One really does learn a lot of medicine—and a lot of clinical reasoning—just from assessing a patient with lupus. —Cindy Flower, MD
References
- Lupus facts and statistics: What is the impact of health disparities on people with lupus? Lupus Foundation of America. 2021.
- Demographics. Barbados Integrated Government. 2021
- Flower C, Hennis AJM, Hambleton IR, et al. Systemic lupus erythematosus in an African Caribbean population: Incidence, clinical manifestations, and survival in the Barbados National Lupus Registry. Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken). 2012 Aug;64(8):1151–1158.
- Flower C, Hennis AJ, Hambleton IR, Nicholson GD. Lupus nephritis in an Afro–Caribbean population: Renal indices and clinical outcomes. Lupus. 2006;15(10):689–694.
- Flower C, Hambleton I, Corbin D, et al. The spectrum of neuropsychiatric lupus in a Black Caribbean population: A report of the Barbados Lupus Registry. Lupus. 2017 Sep;26(10):1034–1041.
