Dear Patients, Friends and Colleagues, I hope you had a wonderful holiday season with your family and friends. Now for the challenging part of our year: deep winter! I wanted to tell you a little bit about my wonderful trip to Malta and the first inaugural DASIL meeting. Many of you have asked me about it in our visits. This meeting was a lot of firsts for me; I made friends with physicians and in many cases their spouses from all over the world (South Africa, Israel, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Thailand China, Wales, Italy, Germany, etc.) who have a similar passion for dermatology. I gave 6 talks and a video, a record for me in terms of any one meeting, and I learned a tremendous amount of new information that will make me consider new equipment or new procedures that will bring better results and more comfortable treatments. It was a pleasure exchanging ideas freely with peers, and was the best meeting I have ever been to. We also had a successful Open House – 280 people attended! Thank you to everyone who came, it was an informative but also very fun evening. We have introduced Renew Advantage, our rewards loyalty points system. The wonderful thing about this is that you can receive one point for every $10 you spend on cosmetic treatments at Advanced Dermatology or non-prescription skin care products at skinfo®, and one point is worth $1 in Advanced Dermatology OR skinfo®. We have looked at numerous rewards programs over the years and none were really right until this one. The company is run by industry leading business people and pharmacists; these programs are not easy to administer as they require sophisticated programming and computer interactions with our practice. This is the reason why it costs money to sign up…because there are many people and a lot of technology behind it and unlike a Groupon-type scheme, they are not getting reimbursed a portion of our fees. In essence this is a 10% off program all-year round. Also you WILL be able to get points even on sale items. We understand that money is a precious commodity and everyone wants to make the most of it...so we are offering a way for those of you who do frequent our office to get rewarded for it! Have a great winter, we will see you soon, Amy Forman Taub, MD