Abstract

Abstract: Dermatitis factitia is a ubiquitous, protean, and troublesome disorder. A search of the English literature, which was extensive but not exhaustive, yielded 130 cases in 59 articles. Since most cases probably go unreported, dermatitis factitia is likely to occur often enough to test the diagnostic skill of many dermatologists. Most of the articles cited in this paper were written by dermatologists to alert other dermatologists to possible pitfalls. In this review, we describe the clinical picture, comment on the etiology, detail the problems in differential diagnosis, warn about the dangers of ill-advised surgical intervention, and discuss the types of treatment which have been tried.