PHOTOAGING

Don’t care about your health, about the chances of developing skin cancer?
How about your looks?

Photoaging is one of the most difficult issues that doctors deal with when treating skin. Many men and women ask about their wrinkles, their leathery skin, and what their grandparent’s called “liver spots” (and what doctors call lentigines).

Yes there are lines that come with age, but they are worsened by exposure to the sun, and all kinds of other lines and skin blemishes happen with too much sun exposure.

Even if you think you don’t care now, at some point in time most people do. Yes, there are special creams, lasers, filling materials, cosmetic surgeries and Botox to fool yourself (and hopefully others) into thinking that your skin looks much better than it would otherwise be, but the simplest approach is: Don’t develop these problems in the first place. And that is done by minimizing sun exposure.

ACTINIC KERATOSES AND PRECANCEROUS SKIN LESIONS

These common and mostly harmless lesions are thought of as possible precursors to squamous cell cancer. Nobody really knows how many of these would actually turn into a skin cancer, nor how much time it would take, but we often treat them when they appear and do not go away.