Rowan Jacobson

And I think part of the bigger story on this subject is that the order in which we learn information has a huge impact on what we end up doing about it.

So because that was kind of the first thing we learned about the sun was, uh-oh, it's bad.

It can raise your risk of skin cancer.

So the messaging went out.

avoid the sun but then as you were just saying decade by decade people have been getting less sun exposure we've we've been spending more of our lives indoors we've been putting on more and more sunscreen but rates of skin cancer have continued to climb so obviously

It's the story is not as simple as more sun exposure equals more skin cancer.

It's going to be multifactorial.

And then what has happened since then is sort of late in the game.

Scientists have been learning more and more about these benefits of sunlight that we didn't know about before.

But the horse had already left the barn in a sense, and everyone had incorporated this messaging about avoiding the sun.

So now we're in this weird little dance where we're trying to incorporate our understanding of the good parts of sunlight, which goes against the initial messaging.

is bad yeah and to their credit the dermatologists you know they kind of have one job to do which is reduce rates of skin cancer so that's what their goal is and it's it's a worthy goal so they're going to tell everybody get less sun because that's going to like hopefully change the number on the one thing that's their responsibility but

But built into that, you can see what the problem is.

And it's a problem throughout the sciences and throughout medicine, which is that as we've gotten more sophisticated and our understanding of how the body works has gotten more complicated, unfortunately, what's happened with the sciences is they've become more and more specialized, where there's very few people who are sort of the old school generalists who are supposed to be thinking about overall health.

And instead, we have all these PhD specialists who are thinking about one tiny piece of the picture.

So if you're a dermatologist, you're literally only thinking about reducing rates of skin cancer.

So you're going to tell people, get less sun.

So if there are other conditions outside of dermatology that are going to be affected by sunlight, good or bad, that's not part of your consideration.

So as as researchers have discovered some of these other health benefits, one of the comparisons that gets thrown out there is it's kind of like what if your orthopedist told you to stop exercising, stop running so that you didn't hurt your knee because their goal was to reduce knee injuries and ankle injuries.

And if they told you to never exercise,