Dr Patricia Yap – Helping others regain confidence
HAVING moved to Jamaica from Hong Kong, China, when she was only 10 years old and speaking very little English, coupled with suffering from severe acne as an adolescent, Patricia Yap — now a dermatologist — found transitioning very difficult.
When her self-esteem was at its lowest, she turned to her mother — a Chinese native — for comfort, who reminded Yap of their economic circumstances and that acne was not a fatal condition.
“She said, ‘Listen, five of you behind the counter, only enough money to send you to school and feed you. Ugliness no kill, no cancer. When you make money, you fix it’,” Yap told All Woman in an interview last week.
The then teenager was not offended by her mother’s words, as she knew what she had said was the truth.
Yap said she did not expect to be coddled by her mother, who, along with her Jamaican husband, was tasked with raising five children using the meagre income generated from their family business — a small corner shop that sold patties and other basic items. However, her mother’s words and her skin condition did something to her — they motivated Yap to pursue a career in dermatology.
“I’ve always wanted to pursue medicine. Really, it’s not totally altruistic. I just wanted to fix myself because it was so bad,” she admitted.
She was speaking from her office at Apex Healthcare Associates in Half-Way-Tree, St Andrew, one of the three locations that serve as offices for a group of more than 30 medical practitioners in the Corporate Area and St Catherine. Yap is the chief executive officer of Apex, and the co-founding dermatologist behind ariLabs — a skincare product development company that creates over-the-counter solutions for common skin conditions in people of colour.
Yap recently added another accomplishment to her résumé, that of being a pioneering dermatologist for concocting a cream that visibly reduces the size and appearance of keloids on the skin.
Keloids are a type of raised scar that occur where the skin has healed after an injury, but the scar tissue that is formed grows to be much larger than the original injury that caused the scar. She told All Woman that the idea to create this product came from one of her patients, who desperately wanted to make her keloids less visible in time for her wedding.
“She said she just wanted them gone, so that if her clothes were close fitting they wouldn’t show, so that it didn’t seem as if she had lumps all over. She was coming from Savanna-la-Mar, and I told her that she had to take the bus and come every two to four weeks [for the injection treatment], and she said, ‘Then doc, couldn’t you just put it in a cream, so that I can rub in the meantime when I can’t get to come?’ And that’s how the idea started,” Yap recounted.
Having completed her undergraduate degree with honours in pure and applied chemistry, and her medical degree at The University of the West Indies, then completing her advanced studies in dermatology at University of London (St John’s Institute of Dermatology), Yap revisited her notes on the structure of the skin and the formation of keloids, formulating a cream that was strong enough to not only improve the appearance of keloids, but flatten them. So now, patients no longer had to deal with them protruding from their skin.
“Keloids happen when healing goes wrong. Any inflammation or irritation of the skin can cause them to happen,” Yap explained. “We now have to tell the body to stop healing for the keloids to stop growing. They don’t have anything (form of treatment) that does that, except the injection. But now I have a cream and that is why everyone is so excited.”
Yap said she has turned down offers to launch her new product in other countries, because of her patriotism to Jamaica.
“In China, right now, they’re saying, ‘Doc, just come let’s launch it right now.’ But I wanted to launch in Jamaica first, because this is home. My inspiration is from Jamaica, and I’m Jamaican,” said a smiling Yap.
“What is more important, from a public health point of view, is that I can now teach all the other doctors that once they do any surgery, they should apply this cream, and when [to apply it],” she shared. “Because when someone gets a keloid and it’s really big, you have to cut it again first [to treat it], and that means more scarring.”
As an adult, the dermatologist was able to remedy her acne using medical science, but she never forgot how her acne made her feel about herself as a teenager. This is one of the reasons, she is so proud of her new product that will allow individuals to overcome another skin condition and regain their confidence.
“I do a lot of things to make people feel good about themselves, so that they are now able to face the world,” a proud Yap said.
She showed before-and-after pictures of numerous patients who have used her topical keloid solution to get great results, and shared stories of how their lives were affected based on the locations of their keloids. She beamed with pride as she spoke about one patient who, before, would never take off his hat because of keloids on his scalp. Today he is confident enough to do so after a few months of treatment.
While she uses medicine to uplift and support her patients, Dr Yap is supported by her husband, Christopher Berry, and two sons. She shared that although she has been married for several years, she has kept her maiden name as her sister-in-law is also a practising dermatologist.
Yap is in dialogue with a pharmaceutical company to market her new keloid cream internationally, and hopes to conduct further research to develop products for conditions such as hair loss in black women, pigmentation disorder, vitiligo, melasma, and dark spots resulting from skin trauma such as acne and insect bites.
