American Cancer Society-approved ads are causing a stir by playing loose with the evidence:
“We do have some pretty good evidence that sunscreen will reduce your risk of the less lethal forms of skin cancer,” Dr. Kramer added. “There’s very little evidence that sunscreens protect you against melanoma, yet you often hear that as the dominant message.”Dr. J. Leonard Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society, acknowledges that the advertisement is aggressive. “We have taken some license in taking that message and using it the way we’ve used it,” he said, “because that’s the way to get the message to our target audience.” . . . “To get the message through to me, you have to shock me and get my attention.”
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It might be disingenuous to suggest sunscreen can completely prevent melanoma, but women pay far more attention to melanoma than basal or squamous carcinomas — my parents’ tennis leagues have around a 90% occurrence of the latter, and they’re in their mid-fifties and early sixties. SCC or BCC aren’t something they’ll put on sunscreen to prevent (and wouldn’t have in their younger years). An appeal to both vanity and melanoma is far more likely to succeed.
Interesting to note that the results from the Nambour Skin Cancer Study have just arrived and show at least some unanticipated protective effect of sunscreen against melanoma.
For women, one reason for using sunscreen at least on faces is to protect skin for premature ageing. Looks are important.
One study I’d like to see is the incidence of non-skin cancers in people who use sunscreen or not, given the protective effect of vitamin D.
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