The Blade and Light Society is a friendly, collaborative group of surgical dermatologists, including fellowship trained Mohs, laser, and cosmetic surgeons. The society has 3 main goals:
1. Charitable work and public service: To provide teaching to doctors and free surgical care to patients in underserved areas in the US and abroad. As experts in the detection and safe removal of skin cancers, we consider it our duty to ensure that needy patients have access to such services.
2. Research: To improve clinical care for all patients by performing collaborative clinical trials that answer important questions about how best to diagnose and treat skin cancer, disfiguring skin conditions, and other skin diseases.
3. Mentoring: To continually teach each other how to be better surgeons through advanced coursework and by mentoring of more junior surgeons by more established surgeons.
research
The Blade and Light Society is committed to multicenter clinical research designed to improve the quality of healthcare. We are interested in maximizing safety, efficacy, and persistence of effect achieved by surgical procedures. Conversely, we wish to minimize cost, adverse events, and inconvenience. Much of our research is aimed at finding the best surgical approach for a particular medical problem. Various important surgical questions, such as those regarding rare tumors or novel surgical devices, may be difficult to address at a single site in a timely manner but may be answerable when data from multiple sites is pooled.
mentoring
Our members care deeply about their patients, and want to provide the best possible care in their own practices. To this end, we seek to continue our medical educations by completing additional coursework, attending hands-on training sessions, discussing complex cases with colleagues, and nurturing junior surgeons so that they can grow as surgeons. At major annual surgery meetings, the Blade and Light Society sponsors dinner meetings to encourage our members to meet each other to nurture ongoing professional relationships and to learn from each other.
charity
We believe that the best way to provide necessary skin cancer care to underserved people is to both deliver free surgical care and to train local physicians in skin cancer surgery. To this end, the Blade and Light Society is committed to identifying locations throughout the world where a high incidence of skin cancer occurs in the absence of adequate medical care. We then organize missions to these locations to threat indigent patients and to provide a training course to local dermatologists and other physicians interested in the treatment of skin cancer. Over time, we maintain and nurture relationships with physicians in these locations, and send them supplies, equipment, and books that help then continue to care for their needy patients.”