Wellness Wednesday is sponsored by Intermountain Health.
Do you know the most common form of cancer diagnosed worldwide?
It’s skin cancer.
Skin cancer can be easy to prevent and it’s often easy to treat. But both prevention and treatment only work if you pay attention and act – which is especially important in Utah.
“We are the number one highest rates of melanoma in the country in Utah,” said Dr. Tawnya Bowles, the Medical Director of Oncology at Intermountain Health. Bowles specializes in treating in treating melanoma.
Bowles said, “Melanoma is not the most common skin cancer, but it's the most deadly. Melanoma can grow under the surface of the skin. And then it gets the ability to potentially spread to other parts of the body, and even threaten life.”
Even then survival rates are high in part because of increased awareness of the disease and its common causes which present a double whammy in Utah.
“We have a high UV index, high elevation here. And a lot of patients that are at risk who have more fair skin, light colored eyes,” said Bowles.
Skin cancer protection, and political scandals have something in common. It's all about the cover up – in skin cancer’s case covering up with clothes.
“So, if I'm outside gardening, I'm wearing that hat, it comes all the way around. And I wear long sleeves. So, wear a light, you know, cotton or kind of cotton shirt to cover my arms,” said Bowles.
And covering up with sunscreen - which doesn't need to be fancy.
“The brand names are not better than the generics here. What we need is an SPF of 30. And if you can find a sunscreen that you like to wear that’s SPF of 30 it can be a generic brand. They have the same ingredients that make them effective,” said Bowles.
If you are like me, you've heard these warnings a lot and you haven't done a lot about it. I showed Dr. Bowles some changes in the skin pigmentation on my arm because I've lived a life where I love to be outside and I have not used enough sunscreen.
The good news?
"You should not be worried about that," said Bowles. "You know, we do have changes in our skin over time from sun exposure and from age that are not worrisome. There can be color change. You have some color change in your skin. That can happen over time and it's not worrisome."
So my arms are OK. But we all need to pay attention to the spots that show up on our skin.
“The edges matter. So, anything that looks like a different shape we don't trust in our clinics. So, a flower a heart, Mickey Mouse mole. I want people to trust their instinct on this that is something on your skin looks different or changing. That's a spot that needs to get checked,” said Bowles.
UV is most dangerous when the sun is at its peak in the sky. That’s between 10am and 2pm. The hottest time of the day tends to be in the late afternoon. In other words, skin cancer is about the intensity of the sun, not about heat.
