In June Roche, the maker of the acne drug Accutane, quietly pulled the drug off the market citing competition with generic equivalents as the reason, not problems with safety. Accutane is a very effective medication used for severe acne, but it also has many potential side effects, some very serious.

In October 2007 a Florida man who took Accutane for nine years was awarded $7 million when a jury decided that Roche did not adequately warn about Accutane's risks which helped cause the inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's disease, in the 31-year-old man.

More recently on October 27, 2009 a Florida appeal court reversed the $7 million judgement against Roche. In a unanimous opinion the court said that the patient did not prove that the lack of adequate warning caused his disease.

Now in the latest development, in a study presented last week at the annual meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology in San Diego, researchers from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, presented evidence that people who take Accutane are at a higher risk of developing inflammatory bowel disease. However, the risk of developing Crohn's disease was not increased.

The risk of developing inflammatory bowel disease is low in general. Only 5 to 10 people in 100,000 are diagnosed each year. When I think back on the patients I've prescribed Accutane to, I think most of them would have taken that chance because they were so distraught over the severity of their acne. Which is more important, the pain and suffering of severe acne or the risk of inflammatory bowel disease? I suspect the answer depends on whether you develop inflammatory bowel disease.

In a study published earlier this month investigators found that people who have had shingles are at a 30% higher risk of having a stroke. And that risk is about 4-fold higher if the shingles outbreak involves the eye, a condition called herpes zoster ophthalmicus.

It's hypothesized that the way the varicella zoster virus (VZV) can cause a stroke is by spreading along nerve fibers in the brain to the blood vessels where it causes inflammation and increases the risk of blood clotting.

This study raises many questions about how to prevent stroke in people who've had shingles. It's not known if aggressively treating other risk factors for stroke like high blood pressure and high cholesterol helps reduce this risk.

In a recent study published in the Archives of Dermatology investigators have shown that aggressive microdermabrasion does lead to significant changes in the dermis similar to what is seen in healing wounds.

Microdermabrasion is a popular procedure for skin rejuvenation. The procedure involves buffing the skin with tiny hard beads of aluminum oxide or diamonds which gets rid of dead skin cells on the surface of the skin giving the skin a smoother, more youthful appearance.

Some have suggested that microdermabrasion can also reduce fine lines and wrinkles, acne scars, dark spots, and other signs of aging skin. In order to do this, microdermabrasion would have to cause collagen (the scaffolding of the skin) to be produced, but previous studies with aluminum oxide beads don't always show changes in collagen.

In this study the investigators used diamond-studded handpieces with medium grit and coarse grit on the forearm skin of people with sun damage. The medium grit handpieces did not induce a wound healing response, but the coarse grit handpiece did. In addition the investigators found precursors to collagen production in the skin of the coarse microdermabrasion subjects.

All this talk of buffing the skin with coarse grit diamond pieces may conjure up pictures in your mind of faces with the top layer of skin removed like with a road rash. But the subjects only experienced minimal redness that lasted less than 2 hours.

Do you have a rash that itches? Well, you're not alone. Winter is an especially itchy season when itchy rashes tend to flare up.

Do you know what kind of rash you have? Whether a rash itches or not is often an important clue to knowing what's going on with your skin. The following are common itchy rashes. Do you see yours?