“It’s the best kind of cancer you can get,” she says hanging up the phone. I don’t like “best” and “cancer” in the same sentence. She knew it wasn’t going to be good news when the clinic left a message to call back. We were camping in a state park in southern Vermont. All of the little pressing needs of sleeping in tents and living off a picnic table swept us back into the present.
More people have skin cancer than all other types of cancer combined. Rates of melanoma -- the worst kind of skin cancer -- have gone up 200 percent between 1973 and 2011, according to acting US Surgeon General Boris Luchniak in a recent report. This type of cancer kills 9,000 people a year. Despite the alarming rise, skin cancer is both treatable and preventable.
Later, my wife made the appointment to have the growth removed. Melanin-challenged, I like to call her. Sun-deprived Northern Europe runs deep in her genes. She sees a dermatologist regularly who’s mapped and measured the little constellation of moles on her back. She’s supposed to use wide-brim hats and sunscreen. Sometimes she forgets the hat. I nag her about hats all the time.
When I was a kid in the late 70s, we spent all day getting baked by the sun at a pool. You burned once in the spring, then spent the rest of the summer in a speedo, brown as a bean. My mother read crime novels while sunbathing on the patio. Now we make our kids wear swim shirts, and we slather them with a layer of 50 sunscreen.
Just under 5 million people were treated for skin cancer last year, so most cases of skin cancer are treatable. But it turns out that a whole lot of them are preventable as well. Aside from blocking the sun from hitting your skin with shirts, hats, and screens, you can stay out of tanning beds.
The use of tanning beds is the American cheese of the beauty industry. Both are ultimately fakes; while they might look tasty at first, they leave you unnourished; and they both give off an unnatural orangey glow. Thanks in part to the popularity of tanning beds with particular demographics, “over the last three decades, the number of people with skin cancer has grown higher than that of all other cancers combined.”
Among other findings, The Surgeon General’s report concluded that tanning with electricity contributes to two thirds of the new melanoma cases each year, over 6,000 cases. Additionally, skin cancer is the most widespread type of cancer among youth and young adults. And so they’ve taken some corrective action by banning the use of tanning beds for people under 18.
The Indoor Tanning Association -- yes, there really is such an organization -- disputes the link between melanoma and fabricated ultraviolet light. If tanning on a tanning bed is American Cheese, the ITA must be Kraft.
Like hats, you can wear them or not. Hey, it’s a free country, right? I can go on down to the store and buy myself a pack of Marlboro Reds if I want. Maybe a better analogy for indoor tanning and the ITA is Philip Morris.
“Proponents of sun avoidance always exaggerate the risks of exposure to ultraviolet light in order to get the attention of the public, the media and the government,” the association said. But let’s just take a look at the motives here for a second: tanning beds are about turning profit by appealing to vanity, and the SG is about promoting health by appealing to common sense.
As for me I’ll keep trying to promote common sense in my family: I’ll keep packing the hats.
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