Have you noticed a new abnormality on your skin? It could be skin cancer. If caught early, it can be treated. That’s why it’s important to schedule an appointment if you have any concerns. Wesley Fletcher, MD, a dermatologist at Avera Medical Group Pierre explains what you should be looking for when it comes to your skin.
Is it skin cancer?
Skin cancer can look like lots of different things. Mostly we just counsel patients to be aware of any areas that are bleeding, changing or not healing on their own. We usually like to see any kind of trauma or blemishes heal up between two and four weeks. Areas that are staying around longer than that, we usually have them get it checked out.
What are treatment options?
When you make an appointment with your dermatologist, they’ll ask you questions like we talked about, "is the spot changing, bleeding, growing?" If they feel that the symptoms warrant further investigation then they would be looking at doing something like a skin biopsy. A biopsy helps us determine the spot that we are talking about is benign or if it’s cancerous. Most of the time that can be done under local anesthesia in the clinical office. Once the biopsy is done and we have the results then we can talk about whether that spots looks like if it’s something that’s benign or something that needs further treatment.
How common is skin cancer?
I think skin cancer, especially in central South Dakota, is very, very common. We see it very often in our practice. We see both melanoma skin cancer and non-melanoma. Traditionally we divide skin cancer into non-melanoma and melanoma skin groups, so there’s lots of different kinds of skin cancer. We worry more about skin cancers like melanoma because they can be life threatening and so when we are talking about spots getting darker, changing, getting bigger on their own, we try to determine whether this is a type of skin cancer that we can treat just locally in our office or whether this is something that is going to require more of a team approach, maybe with medical oncology or radiation, or other types of physicians as well.
