Lotions and potions: pearls of topical therapy

Although an adequate training in pharmacology is given to all medical students, there remains a large area of therapeutics which is empirical. Over their years of practice, most physicians accumulate a collection of useful remedies which are known colloquially as `pearls'. This paper, a successor to a similar paper on dermatologic bases published in this Journal eleven years ago, presents a collection of dermatological pearls that the author has found useful in his years of practice as a dermatologist.