Dr. Mitchell Elliott Bender

You can see them on the skin and the fingernails on the hands.

And that's a very serious condition because that can mean systemic infection called sepsis.

and if you go to the emergency room, they'll look at your skin, and that's a very serious thing, and those people have to be treated with antibiotics quickly, and their heart situation has to be assessed quickly.

There are other conditions that show up on the skin that indicate serious internal conditions, bad liver disease, lung disease,

colon disease, kidney disease.

So it's not that the skin itself is necessarily in danger, but it indicates that there is an internal condition which needs immediate attention.

So those have to be diagnosed quickly.

I think it really goes across the lifespan because infants, including newborns, can show some very serious things that have to be addressed pretty quickly, either because they're already in crisis or they might develop into a crisis.

So you'd like to get them diagnosed sooner rather than later.

Yeah, well, you're absolutely right.

And what I'm going to be saying is pretty much echoing what the American Academy of Dermatology, which is our main educational society in dermatology, says.

We're very concerned about skin cancers.

Skin cancer is the most common kind of cancer affecting human beings.

There are over 5 million cases diagnosed in the United States each year.

There are about 105,000 people who die each year from one of the more serious kinds of skin cancer called malignant melanoma.

And the overwhelming majority of those cancers are related to ultraviolet light exposure.

And starting from an early age,

So we are trying to alert the public about sun protection, and we're trying to get people to use sunscreen, to wear hats with a brim, and now wear photoprotective clothing.

You can buy clothing which has sun protective harmless chemicals added to the fabric.

Because just a few statistics I think will speak for themselves.