Skin Cancer Awareness Fine Arts Skin & Laser Aesthetic Plastic Surgery

Speaker 1: Are you worried that you might have skin cancer? Skin cancer is the most common cancer by far. It's more common than all other cancers combined. In fact, if you look at the Caucasian population in North America, half of us can expect to have a skin cancer in our lifetime, if you've been in the sun at all, or even worse, if you've been in tanning beds. So what do you look for with skin cancer? One, is it funny looking? Does it itch? Does it bleed? Is it getting bigger? Is it changing color? Those are some signs of a lesion that would make you concerned or suspicious that you have a skin cancer going on. Obviously someone's going to need to look at it.

Here at Fine Arts Skin & Laser, we do 2000 to 3000 skin cancer reconstructions every year. It's a very big part of our practice and we're a specialist in that, so we look at it with a binocular high-power microscope from the beginning, before we can even recommend what you should do about it. And the nice thing about that is, 99 percent of the time, we can tell you, is this a cancer, just by looking at it with the high power microscope. Or is it benign? And then there are a few of them that we're not real sure about, and then we'll tell you the percentage of probability that that is or isn't. And then we can decide, is this something that we want to remove and have a pathologist look at it and just get it out of the picture? Or something that we want to just sort of now watch and see what happens with it over the next three to six months.

So what you should do with skin cancer is this. You should be very precautious, so that you don't get the sort of radiation that would promote or accelerate skin cancers, tanning beds especially, or noon sun. Two, if you have something that's suspicious, someone should take a look at it. And if it's very suspicious, it needs to be removed with a margin of normal skin around it so that we get the whole thing off, or at the very least biopsied, and then decide if it needs to come off even further than that.

So skin cancer is a very serious problem, it's the number one cause of cancer death in women 20 to 30. It's not something that everybody else gets, it's something that many of us will get in our lifetime. And it's something that, if we can get them early and when they're small, the cosmetic injury is very, very minimal and the recovery rate or the cure rate can be extremely high right up... Some of them, we can tell you there's a hundred percent chance we got all of that out of there. So it's a easy problem as you get it in a timely manner. If you let it go, then it becomes problematic.

So skin cancer treatment is an essential medical procedure, and it's covered by every insurance plan. Cost of skin cancer removal, let's say you don't have insurance, could be just several hundred to, at the most $1,000 or $2,000, in the very extreme case of a big skin cancer flap. So it's a pretty affordable procedure, it's not something dramatic. If someone's taking you to the operating room, yes, you can see costs in the several thousand dollar range. If we do it here in our offices, we have surgical suites here, we avoid OR costs and anesthesiologist costs, and it's far more convenient. This is our specialty, this is our baby. We love to do it. We'd love to see you here to take a look at your lesions of concern and do a surveillance screen if that's appropriate for you, and then come up with a plan about where we go from there.