Been a little quiet on the blog as I have been slammed with work stuff and still trying to recover from whatever that second virus-head-cold thing was. It’s SXSW in Austin and the sleep deficit I’m carrying isn’t going to be wiped out anytime soon. But I did see an interesting story I wanted to share. Researchers at the University… Read more »
I just read an interesting article regarding how early should you think about protecting your skin from the sun. Now, I have some issues with the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force for their lack of recommending annual skin exams; but this time, they are recommending physicians talk to parents of young, fair-skinned children even earlier than previously recommended. Want to know… Read more »
Because of my history of amelanotic nodular melanoma, I’m all too familiar with skin cancer arising out of a patch of clear skin. Apparently researchers agree that new skin spots are just as worthy of a dermatologist’s review than existing moles. The science behind this claim? Researchers reviewed 38 previously published medical studies involving more than 20,000 melanomas. Only 29%… Read more »
Today, I saw two different stories about celebrities who were diagnosed with skin cancer, in this case, basal cell carcinoma. As mentioned in a previous post, basal cell carcinoma is the most frequently diagnosed skin cancer. While not usually deadly, it can be disfiguring if not caught in time. Bethanny Frankel had a growth under her eye removed that turned… Read more »
In one of my first posts, I talked about the different types of melanoma and where you can end up with a lesion (i.e. pretty much everywhere on the human body). A recent story put the spotlight on a little-known way melanoma can manifest – on a fingernail. In the story, a manicurist had a client that came in looking… Read more »
I am not a morning person. I blame that on the fact that I was born around noon and my internal clock was then set for me to be an afternoon-type person. So, I missed the recent story on the Today Show (which airs when I’m still stumbling around semi-coherently in the morning getting ready for work) about an Austin woman… Read more »
You may have heard of radon. It’s a colorless, tasteless, odorless gas – meaning if it’s around you, you really have no way of knowing it’s there without a detector. Why do you need to be concerned about it? Well, for one thing – it’s radioactive. It’s on par with plutonium in that it releases alpha particles. (I know way… Read more »
Not sure if many of you saw the recent study that shows an increased risk of melanoma for white wine drinkers. I tried to find the least technical article to break down what the study results actually say, and I think this one from Forbes does the trick. In summary, the writer of the article (who’s a professor of biomedical… Read more »
I just read a discouraging article that notes that patients with darker skin tones have a much worse chance of their melanoma becoming fatal. The article references a study performed by Case Western Reserve University (incidentally close to my hometown in Ohio and a very well-respected institution) that found that patients with black skin had the worst survival rates for melanoma…. Read more »
It’s back-to-school time for a lot of families here in the United States and my Facebook feed is stuffed full of images of friends’ children all decked out for the first day of school. I have no children and generally scroll past these images thinking to myself “how the hell did my friends get so old that they could have… Read more »