Hey Grandpa! Why do you go to the dermatologist so often?!

By Haleigh Lugg 

*Viewer discretion, this blog contains an image of a back*

My grandpa is 83 years old, born and raised in North Carolina.  As a teen, he regularly worked in the fields, cultivating everything from tobacco, cotton, and even corn.  He was a young man that worked under the beating sun from sun up to sun down without so much as one drop of sunscreen.  

Because who needs sunscreen as a hard working farm boy?


Like every one who ends up growing up, he moved away to New Jersey.  When living up North, it is clear that access to a dermatologist is easier in relation to in the south where there is a lack of accessibility (Ezzedine et al, 2008).  As he grew up, he started to understand that having regular dermatology check-ups is an important task considering he had a multitude of moles on his back. (Seriously, you would think that the Lord splattered mole paint all down his back!) He's never had any skin related issues but that is because he always went to for check-ups and stayed on top of his health. He had a faithful dermatologist over the 50 years living in New Jersey but once he hit retirement age, he high-tailed it back to good ole North Carolina where most of his family resided. Now I know what you’re thinking, 


Haleigh, why is this even important?!


Personal image of my grandpa's back.


This is important because once he came back to North Carolina, he wanted to continue his dermatology journey and ensure no skin cancer or any other issues came up, even in his retirement. 


But doctors in the south are not as attentive!! 


What I mean by this is that they are so quick to just look you over in a small area for five minutes, prescribe you medication, and move on to the next patient (Ebede & Papier, 2006).  This is grandpa’s biggest complaint:  The doctor just doesn’t take the time to listen to my concerns and actually check me over.  Something that is not talked about is how dermatologists are not being entirely versed in patient care when it comes to pigmented individuals.  Pathology in regards to pigmented skin is a specific field where resources for this are limited (Ezzedine et al, 2008).  We are now able to do telemedicine visits which are extraordinary for patients that cannot physically leave their homes to come to an office but this does not completely benefit pigmented patients because these telemedicine applications are not being run by people versed in observing diseases that are harder to recognize in darker skin.  (Ezzedine et al, 2008).  There is a project called Black Skin Dermatology Online (BSDO), which was developed in order to enhance teledermatology that focuses on pigmented skin (Ezzedine et al, 2008). Grandpa will always say that as you get older, the wiser you get.  This is true because now when he works outside, he’ll have on long sleeve shirts, hats, and adequate sunscreen protection. It is important for everyone to care for their skin and have themselves regularly checked over by a dermatologist to ensure that any new changes can be noted immediately and acted upon.  If we can continue to gain public awareness about skin protection, we can help curve the amount of people developing skin cancer every year.




References:

Ebede, T., & Papier, A. (2006). Disparities in dermatology educational resources. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, 55(4), 687–690. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaad.2005.10.068


Ezzedine, K., Amiel, A., Vereecken, P., Simonart, T., Schietse, B., Seymons, K., Ndiaye, B. S., Leemput, C. van, Stevens, A., de Weert, J., Lambert, J., & Heenen, M. (2008). Black Skin Dermatology Online, from the project to the website: A needed collaboration between North and South. Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, 22(10), 1193–1199. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-3083.2008.02762.x






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IS YOUR JOB PUTTING YOU AT RISK FOR SKIN CANCER?

Image
By S. Fabian <A farmer leans over his crops tending to the vegetables and checking on his recent harvest.> (Hustoles [date unknown]) The sun is everywhere. You can’t escape it, but you can reduce your chances of getting skin cancer by making it a habit to use sun protection on a daily basis especially if your job requires you to be outdoors for a majority of time. There was a person that I knew who worked with a close relative of mine. They worked as a structural welder, it’s basically like a welder but that wields larger metal parts for example roads, base of buildings, and ships. They are constantly hanging  from these buildings at high altitude working.   Let alone from the equipment that they are working with poses as a direct exposure to these harmful rays but also being at high altitudes. Since the higher you are in the Earth’s atmosphere the more likely you are to be exposed to unfiltered UVB rays. According to the Skin Cancer Foundation, UV radiation exposure inc...
Read more

THE SUN IS NOT LIGHT BULB

Image
  Everytime we are looking at the sun we see this gigantic white and yellow circle. In those couple of seconds a lot happened, for example the sun release such amount of energy that the whole humanity did not spend in the entire history. Now imagine, heat light, fire, explosion all in one, but wait all of these contain energy. Radiation is energy that comes from a source and travels through space at the speed of light . This energy has an electric field and a magnetic field associated with it, and has wave-like properties. Therefore with all of that energy we have multiple wavelength, giving birth to different variation of radiation. One of these reaches the violet in the spectrum, aka ultraviolet rays, or UV rays. We would like to introduce what this guys are, and how they interact to our body, showing yes the risks that we encounter but the benefits and how to protect ourselves. It’s sunny, is hot, you are with your friends, the sand is burning under your feet you jump from a sha...
Read more

Where is my information going?

Image
By S.Fabian Figure 1. Direct to consumer testing kit https://live.staticflickr.com/7906/47400098641_0eae7ebdb0_b.jpg  Figure 2: My direct testing results How many times have you wondered about your ancestry or were curious about potential diseases your genetic history might encompass? I know for a fact that I was curious to see  my ancestry, so I embarked on a quest to try direct-to-consumer testing for my ancestry. My results were pretty much what I had predicted. I was about 87.7% Indigenous American and 9.3% European. These were nice results to receive as I was also able to connect with a long-lost cousin in the family line. However, in light of feeding my curiosity I didn’t think much of the policies that were put into place to protect my information. So what are they? Do we even know what they are? As we do so much to make sure our SSN or credit card information is protected, shouldn’t we do the same for our genetic information? Like that is literally us while the other t...
Read more