Professor Yaffle
Butterbeans and Breadcrumbs
I have come across arguments several times (possibly all from the same source) that increased exposure to the sun does not cause an increase in malignant melanomas. I read an article about the same thing recently and it reminded me to ask about it here:
Has anyone here looked into this before? Is this guy (he's a professor of dermatology) a lone crank in the field using dodgy arguments/methodology, or does he have a valid case?
ETA: Here's a piece from him in the BMJ:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/jul22_2/a764
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/21/melanoma-myth-skin-cancer-sunSkin cancer statistics are used to scare, not educate. Almost all of the 84,000 skin "cancers" that appear each year are in fact benign: they don't spread or kill; their cancerous name is a historical misnomer. Of course, sun exposure increases facial wrinkling, as does smoking, but the black ace in the fear game is melanoma, because the real thing is vicious.
As the article tells us, Cancer Research UK say the incidence of malignant melanoma has "quadrupled in Britain in the last 30 years". But if this were so we would have seen coffin-loads of consequences by now. We haven't, and in a recently published large UK study (British Journal of Dermatology, 2009), I and my colleagues showed that the reason mortality has not increased with incidence is that the tumours reported are actually benign; they are not true malignant melanomas. Our explanation of the phoney melanoma epidemic is "diagnostic drift which classifies benign lesions as … melanoma", a misdiagnosis "driven by defensive medicine, an unsurprising response to its commercialisation".
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Has anyone here looked into this before? Is this guy (he's a professor of dermatology) a lone crank in the field using dodgy arguments/methodology, or does he have a valid case?
ETA: Here's a piece from him in the BMJ:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/jul22_2/a764
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