Rowan Jacobson

Well, is it true?

Is it true that skin cancer rates are going up?

Yes.

And part of the explanation, and everyone pretty much agrees on this, is that it's diagnosis.

Like, we're looking a lot more than we used to.

So you look for anything more, you look more carefully, you look at everybody, you're going to find it more.

And this is especially the case we know with melanoma, where there weren't that many people getting full body checks every year back in the day.

So probably some melanomas got missed.

And that's kind of also reflected by the fact that melanoma incidence has been rising very quickly for 40 or 50 years.

But melanoma mortality hasn't changed at all and has actually been going down in recent years.

So when you see incidence and mortality going in opposite directions, that's often a sign of overdiagnosis.

But in this case, it's not overdiagnosis might not necessarily be a problem.

Like if you're finding

things that will turn into melanoma very early and removing them that's not a bad thing even if you're you know erring on the side of caution and removing a bunch of things that would not turn into melanoma

like i know you know if i had one and my doctor said there's only a 30 chance this is going to turn into melanoma i'd still say you know get rid of it the other other piece of that that's demographics is that you know we're getting older as a as a country we're living longer than we did 50 years ago so we have a lot more people who are in their 70s 80s and 90s which is when you tend to get cancers right how convinced is science that sunblock prevents skin cancer

Yeah, you're gonna get me in so much trouble on this one.

This is a hotly debated topic.

within the industry and the academy, you know, among the experts, that debate doesn't tend to filter out to the mainstream media very often.

But most studies that have been done that have looked at use of sunscreen and skin cancer end up showing that more sunscreen use correlates with higher rates of skin cancer.

What?