Skin dermatology getting personal

Better safe than sorry.

The joys of advancing years ….

Get your skin tested.

Several of my readers are skin specialists. One of them regularly comes to Lauder to do staff skin checks that are paid for by NIWA. I missed her visit last time. Hopefully she’ll look at the picture below and tell me what it is and what to do about it. I think it’s something she identified as needing attention when I last saw her a couple of years back. But I can’t be sure. One blemish looks much like another.

I’m pretty sure its not the most dangerous form of skin cancer, melanoma. Hopefully it’s just a pre-cancerous lesion like solar keratosis. But it could also be one of the more common forms of skin cancer, basal cell carcinoma. Although not nearly as dangerous as melanoma, these can still result in death. About 2,000 Americans die from it each year. So it’s worth doing something about it.

My choices were (1) an immediate freeze-killing with liquid nitrogen, or (2) a daily treatment with Efudix cream for 3 weeks. Choice 1 required a visit to my GP, so I went with choice 2, using some left-over cream from a (successful) treatment the previous winter to similar outbreaks on my face.

Content warning. Unsightly images follow ….

The first image below was taken just before I started my 3-week treatment with Efudix cream. It shows a portion of my upper leg with the lesion at centre .

start treatment

As you can see in the image below, it looked much worse three weeks later when I stopped the treatment. Sorry about the difference in colour-balance between those. Probably one was taken outdoors and the other indoors.

3 weeks later

Not pretty. But, that flare-up after Efudix treatment is expected. Over the next week or two, the lesion gradually faded away. My self-help treatment apparently worked.

Here it is 4 weeks after treatment finished. Not quite perfect, but near enough …

I found here a few examples of the various types of skin cancer. Some are shown below. Even less pretty.

If you’re planning on having a long life, it’s worth taking time to protect your skin. It reminds me of my old dentist, recently retired, who advised:

You should floss only the teeth you want to keep. No need to worry about the others.

But you have only one skin. Even though it’s in many ways a self-repairing organism, it clearly doesn’t fully recover from sun damage. If you have any concerns about your skin (and even if you haven’t), get it tested.