Blog About Health & Medicine

Dermatologists see excessive tanning as Public Enemy Number 1 because it mars the skin with premature wrinkles, blotches,   bloated   blood   vessels,   and freckles. Worse, it can lead to cancer. Intense sunlight containing ultraviolet light penetrates deep inside your skin cells.

Thanks to a doctor’s quick action, Jane Kimbrough, 48, of Dobbs Ferry, New York, sailed past melanoma, or “black cancer.” In 1983, her doctor found a black dot on her big toe. Because it was promptly removed, she has less than a 1 percent chance of dying of melanoma in the next 10 years. Left to grow, that cancer kills 50 percent of its victims within 5 years.

“I had a friend who died of melanoma,” Ms. Kimbrough says. “I consider myself very fortunate.” The fair-skinned actress once worked at tanning but now shuns sun and regularly checks her body. Her physician, Dr. Darrell S. Rigel, a dermatologist at New York University Medical Center, estimates that 22,000 Americans developed melanoma last year, and 5,500 died of it.

“The biggest advance is the development of sunscreens,” says Dr. Rigel. “A number 15 sunscreen lets in only 1/15th of the rays. If people use such creams, the cancer rate will fall.” And, he adds, that includes basal cell cancer (the one that attacked President Reagan’s nose) and squamous cell cancer.

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