Ask A Doctor: Dermatologist Dr. Anna Chacon on Maximizing Your Appointments and the Research Gap

Most of us have left a doctor's appointment with the thing we actually needed to say still stuck in our throat. Dr. Anna Chacon — board-certified dermatologist, psoriasis patient, and one of the few dermatologists working in rural New Mexico and Alaska — has spent her career thinking about exactly that problem. In this episode, she and Holly talk about how to prepare for an appointment, how to actually say the hard thing once you're in the room, and what it looks like when doctors genuinely try to meet patients where they are — and when they don't. Plus: the story of a 1977 FDA policy that excluded women of childbearing potential from early-stage clinical trials, and the sixteen years it took to change the law. Holly traces the downstream effects — wrong dosing, missed symptoms, psoriasis presentations on darker skin that looked nothing like the textbook — and talks to Dr. Ana about what it means to be a dermatologist trying to fix, from the inside, a system with a very long institutional memory.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.