Thinking Outside of the Box for Pediatric Acne With Latanya Benjamin, MD

In an interview with Dermatology Times®, Latanya Benjamin, MD, FAAD, FAAP, reviewed key highlights of her session at SCALE 2023, “New Age Treatments for Pediatric Acne.” In her talk, Benjamin mainly discussed teen acne and looking beyond traditional treatments, and instead, consider adjuvant therapies such as facials and superficial chemical peels.

Transcript

Benjamin: Hi, my name is Dr. Latanya Benjamin. I'm a pediatric dermatologist practicing in my medical specialty practice, Young Skin, and that's located in Coral Springs/Boca Raton, Florida.

Dermatology Times: What are a few of the key takeaways from your session, "New Age Treatment for Pediatric Acne?"

Benjamin: My session was updates in acne. But what I focused is on the teen population, the adolescent population, and so I did a slight deviation for not just the traditional topical therapies that we use for acne, but also the adjuvant therapies that we don't traditionally speak about in young pediatric patients. Such as facials with comedone extractions and the roles that they play there and superficial chemical peels.

Dermatology Times: What do you want attendees to take away from your session?

Benjamin: Yeah, I think the big thing in this day and age, in the age of instant gratification and in the age of social media, our patients want results fast. And moving from academia into private practice, I've learned that I have to meet those expectations. And because of that, I'm using combination therapies of sorts. So, we have our traditional algorithms, we know what to do, we know how to help folks with acne, more oral medications, topical medications, but there really is some value in exploring what our patients are teaching us. And what we're also learning from our traditional management of acne, where you can actually do procedural therapies, in addition to medical managements that only have a limitation or can only take our patients so far.

Dermatology Times: What are you enjoying so far about SCALE 2023?

Benjamin: There's so many things. First of all, this is my first year being invited as a faculty. I'm super delighted, super thrilled. And it was a little intimidating because as pediatric dermatologists, we're typically managing acne with medical therapies. And then we have a lot of new medical therapies that have come on the horizon in the past 5 years. But when I realized that this is more of a cosmetic type of conference, I really stretched myself to be honest and share what I'm doing that's novel, or maybe not as novel but really has a novel role in the pediatric population.

[Transcript edited for clarity]