Thank you for listening to my Dermatology Weekly podcast interview!
If you haven't seen it yet, you can check the interview out here or anywhere podcasts are distributed.
Read the story that inspired the interview here.
Care for sexual and gender minority patients (members of the LGBTQ+ community) is an important topic in medicine across a variety of different therapeutic areas.
Some numbers:
- According to a poll from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, as many as 4.5% of Americans identify as LGBTQ+.
- The number of people in the U.S. identifying as LGBTQ+ is growing—from 3.5% in 2012 to that 4.5% figure in 2017.
- Representation of LGBTQ+ individuals varies by state. A Gallup poll in 2017 ranks the District of Columbia (8.6%), Maryland (5.7%), Vermont (5.3%), Massachusetts/Oregon (4.9%) and California/Nevada (4.8%) as the top states with LGBTQ+ citizens.
The interest in caring for these patients is growing:
In 2018, Dr. Colleen Kraft, then the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, affirmed the academy's support for transgender children. [SOURCE]
At the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research meeting in 2018, Dr. Martin den Heijer, from VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, presented results that showed there were no short- or long-term risks to bone health over the life of a transperson who receives hormone therapy. [SOURCE]
Expert analysis at the ASBMR meeting showed, however, that there is a lot more to learn—such as when to initiate gender-affirming hormone therapies. [SOURCE]
Work presented by Dr. Leena Nahata at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in 2019 showed there is also a question of how to approach fertility preservation in transgender youth [SOURCE].
Finally, there are many, many other considerations in transgender health outside the annual meetings of medical societies that are still being researched and discussed.
So. You're on this page for a reason.
As a medical health specialist who cares for (or is interested in caring for) these patients, what are you interested in learning about LGBTQ+ individuals?
This could be anything from:
- Understanding the right terms to use
- Unique risk factors in this population
- How providers in your therapeutic area can specifically help these patients
- How you can help make your practice more inclusive
(A lot of these are answered in this article and are not specific to dermatology.)