STI Clinical Guide

I’ve been wanting to start publishing guides on this site for some time, and just haven’t gotten around to doing it until now. Because there’s so much content on this site (and still more out there in the interwebs) I figured it might be useful periodically to provide a post that gives you some ideas of how to use the content more broadly than just individual professional enrichment.

STIs are some of the most frequently searched and downloaded information on this site, so it makes sense for our first clinical guide to focus on this content. Much of what’s available are images that can be used to augment slide presentations or case studies. Many of the sites make their images available for people to use freely; others require that attribution be given for each image. I love to combine them with injury images to compare and contrast the variety of genital findings you may come across in an exam and to get people talking about best ways to document, when a physician consult might be necessary, follow-up recommendations, and the like.

To begin, let’s look at what’s already on the site:

• The CDC is always a good source for this information since their treatment guidelines are pretty universally embraced. The picture cards they created are a cool and low-tech way to discuss things like documentation descriptors–just pass them around the table at a staff meeting, or print them out and give everyone a full set. You could even laminate a few of them and keep them on hand as a jumping off point for staff discussions. (Original post here.) They also have complete PowerPoint presentations on several of the STIs here.
• DermAtlas has almost 11,000 images logged on their site, and while you won’t find a comprehensive selection of STI images here, it’s a good place for lesions of all kinds (including those that aren’t associated with significant pathology). Create a case study and add one or two corresponding images for a great, brief, clinical discussion at a staff meeting. (Original post here.)

Besides the aforementioned posts, I have a few other sites I’d like to share with you:

• The University of Washington has a Practitioner’s Handbook for the Management of Sexually Transmitted Diseases. It includes an image gallery that is full of gnarly photos ranging from scabies to syphillis. A great place to find material to augment your PowerPoint presentations.
• Health Awareness Connection has an STI image gallery of their own. The site also has brief STI guides in an impressive array of languages.
• DermNet has a smaller colection of images, as does AVERT (a site which has one of the funniest displays of CYA I’ve seen: some of their images have funny little caution boxes that say Warning! Genitalia)

To augment your discussions, I came across a two-page STI summary (PDF) put together by the National Coalition of STD Directors that would make a great handout.

And because it’s important to sometimes find the funny in the work we do, I give you this video–a spoof on the tune Hey There Delilah by the Plain White T’s. Enjoy.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfTHio6WREc]