ABSTRACT
The increasing use of drugs for the treatment of skin disease has exposed the poverty of traditional methods for assessing therapeutic response. Thus, our account will mostly be a series of discrete structural and functional attributes which are affected by drugs, with a few examples of the response of specific reactions which can to some extent be used as models of disease. Measurement of skin and lesion thickness is a simple and important method of studying the cutaneous response to drugs. A variety of devices are available to measure the extensile response to a linear, shear, rotational or suctional force, and can demonstrate the effects on connective tissue of drugs such as corticosteroids. There are few good models of skin disease, and of these the response to inflammatory agents and its modification by drugs is the most often used to study the effect of drugs.
