Vitamin A and Retinoic Acid Warning!
Please hold off on using all creams containing vitamin A, retinol, retinoic acid, tretinoin, Retin-A and Renova for three days before any facial treatments with us. These creams simply render the skin too sensitive for any type of treatment. We will be glad to reschedule a treatment at your convenience, if you are using any of these creams. We appreciate your understanding and continued patronage.Sunscreen — Use It to Prevent Aging and Skin Cancer
This is a message for our esteemed patients. Please read it. It's important.One easy way to get skin cancer to start and then keep growing is to expose your skin to sunlight without protection. The majority of damage takes place in your first 18 years of life. In effect, this makes skin cancer a pediatric prevention problem in addition to being an adult one.
A lot of help is available to you. The biggest unknown is how good we can be at changing our behavior as adults and parents of children. There must be a way to convince ourselves and others that prevention is important. Whether we fear pain, disfigurement, or death, or whether we worry about losing time, money or body function, the fear itself doesn't matter so much. What matters is that if we can take the bull by the horns, we can actually keep ourselves from getting skin cancer.
We need to make preventive measures a daily way of life. It's not as hard as it sounds. It takes a few small changes in the way we do things. Here are a few. You can tape this simple "to do" list to the bathroom cabinet to help you remember.
This list of suggestions was published as part of a chapter of 69 pages and 789 references on the topic of skin cancer treatment and prevention co-authored by Dr. Kivett in a 2006 published 8,000 page plastic surgery textbook considered to be the primary reference source in the field.
How to Avoid Aging and Skin Cancer
Find a sunscreen that you like for feel, cost and smell. It should be of an SPF (sun protection factor) 15, 20 or 30.Apply the sunscreen on all possibly exposed areas for that day.
Sunscreen doesn't work right away. It must be applied by 8 a.m. to allow for enough penetration before the sun's stronger rays begin to shine at 9 a.m. The strong rays will last until 4 p.m.
Apply the sunscreen every day of the year no matter what the weather. It doesn't matter if it's foggy, overcast, raining or snowing. The damaging rays penetrate to the Earth's surface nearly as well in winter as in summer and right on through clouds and fog. Cold or hot temperatures have nothing to do with the rays. Ask any fisherman when he had his worst sunburn — on a cool, foggy day.
Put the sunscreen on again for every two sun hours you're outside. It doesn't really last all day. Sunscreen is not a complete sun ray block.
Know that the rays are even stronger when they're reflected from walls and water.
Know that tropical areas like Hawaii or Mexico have stronger rays because they're closer to the direct rays on the Equator.
Use mechanical sunscreens where possible, that is, by way of a hat with a brim of at least four inch width, long sleeves and long pants. Clothing from Solumbra Company is light and protective. The company was founded by a melanoma (color cell cancer) survivor to provide comfortable yet protective high SPF clothing for all seasons. Their phone number is 1 800 882 7860. Their website is Solumbra.com. (No, we don't own any stock in the company.)
Try to use a sunscreen with titanium dioxide (tiny metal) particles that reflect the light away. It's added frequently to regular sunscreens.
Men prefer gel sunscreen to lotions, because men are more used to using shaving gels and after-shave skin bracers.
Use sunglasses when you can, with lenses protective against UVA and UVB rays. The label will usually say that they do. These protect the area around the eyes from cancer as well as the eyes themselves from cataracts.
Schedule as many outdoor activities as you can outside of the 9 a.m. - 4 p.m. time slot when the sun's rays are most direct.
Avoid laying out for a tan or going to a tanning salon whose machines produce even stronger cancer-producing rays. Substitute high quality, relatively inexpensive skin tanners or bronzers ("brown in a bottle") which look real and which fade naturally over five days. This good fake tan doesn't give sun protection so you'll have to use sunscreen for that. Some salons now have tanning showers called Mystic Tan or Mist-On Tan. One quick spray and you're good to go with that Hawaiian look to that social event. So, with a "tan" you won't be shamed into really tanning for that big shindig.
One nice way to track your skin's changes is with a one-time photo session with a good camera (digital or film) and a ruler in each photograph. A friend taking a picture of each region is a very helpful way to keep an eye out for new spots or changes in old ones. No one, not you or your spouse or friend or doctor, can hope to remember what a given area looks like. The photos don't forget, though. Around 40 photos are needed to do the job.
The photos should be labeled as to body site, kept on your computer or printed on acid-free paper and put into your dresser drawer. Pull them out for comparison once a year, using your birthday as a reminder. Then you can see any new, larger or changed spots and have those more closely examined by your doctor. If you have spots that you're currently concerned about, it's best to show them to your doctor now before you lose the nerve to do it and before you take your baseline photos. You only need to do this once in your lifetime, unless you lose the photos.
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