Patients often complain to me that they don’t know which department to go to when they have this disease, some say dermatology, others say nephrology or rheumatology. To find out the reason, let’s understand the characteristics of this disease. The name “lupus erythematosus” was translated from Latin (lupus erythematosus), and the skin manifestations of this disease were first described by the French dermatologist Biett in the early 19th century. Because it was seen at that time that such patients had recurrent intractable skin damage on the face or other related parts, manifesting as irregular edematous erythematous plaques with depressions in the middle and raised edges, smooth surfaces, sometimes with scales, and in some cases, changes such as atrophy, scarring, and pigmentation on top of the erythematous plaques, looking like they had been bitten by a wolf, the name “lupus erythematosus “. However, later, with the accumulation of clinical experience and the development of medical science, many clinicians found that the disease not only had skin damage, but also combined with damage to brain, heart, lung, liver, gastrointestinal, kidney, blood, joints, nerves, muscles and other tissues and organs. As a result, more than 100 years ago, the American physician Osler proposed the name “SLE”, which is still used today. Nowadays, it seems that the lupus erythematosus that Dr. Bethe referred to at that time is actually one of the types of lupus erythematosus, namely discoid lupus erythematosus, which is mainly skin damage. Then, what are the types of lupus erythematosus? At present, according to clinical manifestations, there are four main types of lupus erythematosus, including discoid lupus erythematosus, subacute cutaneous lupus erythematosus, deep lupus erythematosus and systemic lupus erythematosus. The first three types of lesions mainly invade the skin and are usually treated in dermatology; while SLE has multi-system organ involvement and heavy damage to internal organs, especially the kidneys. Therefore, it is mainly seen in the department of nephrology or rheumatology. However, because SLE is an autoimmune connective tissue disease, there are a large number of pathogenic autoantibodies and immune complexes in the body. Therefore, persistent discoid lupus erythematosus and subacute cutaneous lupus erythematosus are likely to develop into systemic lupus erythematosus. In contrast, patients with SLE sometimes have atypical manifestations, either without skin damage or with discoid lupus-like skin damage, or with symptoms of other systems, such as joint pain, anemia, proteinuria, etc. Therefore, before confirming the diagnosis of SLE, patients should go to the nephrology department for blood routine, urine routine, liver and kidney function tests to exclude whether they have SLE, and the above tests are also needed during long-term treatment to observe the changes of the disease.