My daughter has been struggling with something that has seemed to baffle the regular doctor for a year now. In the last couple of weeks the purplish brown patches on her feet really started to hurt and darken and as a last ditch effort he sent her to a dermatologist who said, "I'm Dr. D and that looks like granuloma annulare," before he'd even sat all the way down. After he did a full skin exam, he took a biopsy to send off, but he's pretty confident.

It's an auto immune disease and they don't know what causes it. It is not common, but they don't consider it rare either. Obviously he could look right at it and be 98% sure of what it was. Untreated outbreaks can run the course of 2 to 5 years. Normally it doesn't cause pain unless it occurs over joints and then the skin thickens there and starts making it hard to flex those joints. That is what is happening to her.

Treatment will be a series of injections, numerous pinpricks of cortizone throughout the spots. It might be two sessions, it could be up to four, depending on how well she responds to it. They will be six weeks apart. They do have a topical treatment, but it is daily application for 6 months and fails in 75% of patients. And when the patient is in pain they don't recommend it.

She also has a big patch of eczema on her shin. So he gave her a prescription for a cream which she will also use on the patches until the biopsy comes back and we can start on the injections. I'm not sure what the insurance will cover here, but we'll pay it outright if we need to. This is something that is making it hard for her to walk without pain.

Hopefully the insurance will cover at least part of it. Injectible cortizone has been around for decades so I doubt it is still under any kind of patent. I'm pretty sure there are generic versions.

I'm just glad he didn't take one look at it and say cancer. I know we still have to wait two weeks on the biopsy results, but he seemed very confident. I told DD it was probably going to be something where the doctor had never seen it before or knew immediately what it was. I'm glad it seems to be the latter.