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: The Shocking Truth About Skin Cancer: What You Are Not Being Told About The SunI was always suspicious of all these claims about the sun causing skin cancer that kills you and that sunscreen will save you from it.
Like all my health considerations, this was based on common sense and considering the history of humans. We have been walking the planet under full exposure to the sun for millions of years.
Yet, the explosion of skin cancer deaths happened only in the past 60 years. Skin cancer is currently 20% of all cancer deaths in the USA and the single most common cause of cancer death.
The occurrence of skin cancer increased from under 4 to around 40 in the past 60 years, according to the Norway Cancer Registry below. This is a 10-fold increase in a split second of human existence. It also strongly correlates to a massive shift in humans getting out of the sun because more and more jobs are indoors rather than outdoors. So how can this sun be responsible for it?
Source: Above quoted article
Because of all that, I never fully bought into the “sun causes skin cancer narrative”.
However, I was an active surfer for the past two decades and my common sense also told me, that working indoors all week and then getting burned on the weekends, isn’t very skin-healthy either.
Caught between a rock and a hard place, I used sunscreen and sun blockers for many years on my face. But years later, I realized that my face developed Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC) at exactly the places where I had put most of the sunscreen: my nose, my cheekbones and my forehead.
Basal Cell Carcinoma
By far the most common type of skin cancer is basal cell carcinoma (comprising 80% of all skin cancers)
This is caused by the wrong relationship with the sun (too much of it):
The three primary risk factors for BCC are excessive sun exposure, fair skin (which makes you more susceptible to excessive sunlight penetrating your skin), and a family history of skin cancer. Because of this, the widely varying incidence of BCC is largely due to how much sunlight exposure people have, and typically you find it in areas with frequent sunlight exposure (e.g., the face).
The good news, however, is, that it is totally harmless and more of an aesthetic problem than a health problem:
The important thing to understand about BCC is that because it almost never metastasizes, it is not very dangerous. Most sources say it has a 0% fatality rate.
Two Real Case Studies
I had lots of Superficial BCC in my face. I only realized it was BCC because my wife discovered similar-looking BCC spots on her forehead. Unlike me, she is more scared of that stuff and trusts doctors way more than I do.
So she saw a skin cancer specialist - the ones that have huge signs on the roofs of their private clinics - scaring the daylight out of people regarding skin cancer. She was promptly diagnosed with BCC. That’s how we diagnosed my BCC - it looked the same.
Because it was bigger and consisted of three different BCCs, the first specialist wouldn’t treat it on the day but referred her to another specialist. $300 later she wasn’t much wiser - it was still BBC.
The specialist told her that there was a very slim chance that the BCCs would metastasize (not zero as the stats show) and that was all she needed to hear to decide to have it cut out. Aesthetics played a role as well. She wasn’t told the reoccurrence rate is estimated to be between 65% and 95%, depending on which study you believe.
So she opted for an operation to have it removed. To have this done by a private specialist in Australia would have cost her thousands of dollars so she opted to move those costs to the taxpayers (she pays a lot of taxes, so fair enough).
She had to wait almost a year and travel to Sydney to have it done on public money, but that was a small price to pay to save thousands.
At the end of the day, those thousands of dollars still ended up in the pockets of the currently most lucrative medical branch: Dermatology
Dermatology is one of the highest paying specialties. The average starting dermatologist’s salary is $400,000.00 a year, although many, such as Mohs surgeons, often make at least $600,000.00 (and often far more). By comparison, general practitioners typically make around $220,000.00 annually.
There are other great incentives to choose dermatology:
Dermatology is commonly seen as the most desired specialty as it:
• Has a relatively short post-medical training period (it’s only four years).
• It has a relatively relaxed work-life balance (e.g., you only work normal hours during the weekdays and can take a day off).
• It is fairly rare you have to deal with high-acuity or challenging patients, so the stress in this field is very low.
I can only assume, that tens of thousands of Australians chose a very similar treatment for pretty much no-risk BCC occurrences and why not? If the state pays for it, let’s get some tax back. And why does the state pay thousands for an extremely low-risk BCC operation?
Because the health bureaucrats and the lobbying medical industry both gain from it. It justifies the health bureaucrats’ jobs and enriches the skin specialists.
And we disregard the risks and possible side effects any operation can have.
In short and once again: Medicine these days is big business and they have set up the perfect state-sponsored system that keeps it going. And we support it by buying into it.
But what else can be done instead?
One option is always to do nothing. But if the BCC bothers you aesthetically, I successfully treated mine like this:
I started to expose my face and whole body to the sun every day, starting with 10 min in the morning in the Australian winter and slowly building up the exposure. Over time, I developed a healthy deep tan without getting burned once over approximately six months. Now I can be outside in the full midday Australian summer sun without getting burned. I am, by nature, fair-skinned and have regularly been burned before I did this - even with sunscreen.
I stopped using all sunscreen and sun blockers, except in those very rare cases (maybe three times a year), when burning myself would be the only other option. For example, I opted to surf for only 45 minutes without sunscreen instead of 1.5 hours with it and surf early mornings or late afternoons)
I regularly treated my existing BCC with a mixture of MMS drops mixed with a few drops of filtered water and DMSO (needed to take it deeper into the skin). I also used fresh Aloe Vera juice from our plants. (This is no health advice - just reporting what I did)
It took probably a year to get a 90% reduction of BBC and my face looks evenly tanned and the BCC is hardly noticeable.
And now comes the most important lesson of all this. I haven’t developed any new BCC anywhere, while my wife has, constantly worrying and scanning her body. But I slowly get through to her. Yes, it takes time.
As a tremendous positive side-effect, I am also full of Vitamine D through sun exposure, while my wife spends extra dollars on Vitamine D pills.
I wonder what would happen to the BCC industry, worth probably hundreds of Millions in Australia alone if people would stop panicking about BCC and make the sun their friend again as she has been for millennia, instead of following the medical unproven script (see quoted article) and make it their enemy instead?
But what about the other skin cancers, the deadly ones?
Next in line are the Squamous Cell Carcinoma (SCC)
This is about 25% to 50% as frequent as BCC and is also caused by the sun. Unlike BCC, this can be fatal in 5% of the cases, but this requires that people ignore them completely.
Unlike BCC, SCC can be dangerous, as it does metastasize. In turn, if it is removed prior to metastasizing, it has a 99% survival rate, but if removed after metastasis, this drops to 56%. As SCC is typically caught before this happens (in 1-2 years, 3-9% of them will metastasize), the average survival rate for this cancer is around 95%
So it is worth checking your body and if it looks anything like the above, to see a skin specialist.
The real killers of the skin cancers that account for the 20% death rate of all cancers are neither the BCC nor the SCC. They are Melanoma.
Melanoma - The Most Dangerous Skin Cancer But NOT Caused By The Sun
The five year survival rate for melanoma depends upon how far it has spread at the time of its diagnosis (ranging from 99% to 35% and averaging out to 94%), which again makes it important to correctly identify—but likewise, some cases are aggressive and metastasize quickly (so they often don’t get caught in time) and those variants have between a 15-22.5% survival rate. In total, this works out to a bit over 8000 deaths each year in the United States.
Once again, early detection is crucial. So these skin cancer clinics have a purpose - early detection - but know your facts and don’t panic about BCC and SCC.
Don’t get pulled into the unnecessary BCC and SCC removal industry. These so-called skin cancers (why are they even named “cancers” could be debated) are almost always harmless and it is up to you to ask the hard questions. The doctors happily operate on you, no matter what. That’s how they get rich.
And more importantly - don’t panic about reasonable, regular, non-burning exposure of all your skin to the sun. It is and always has been good and healthy for us to expose ourselves to the sun in a healthy way. And be very wary of sun cream. My personal experience is negative.
Existing research has found using sunscreen either has no effect on the rates of malignant melanoma or increases it, which makes it quite frustrating that governments around the world always parrot the advice to wear more of it, especially whenever melanoma rates are rising (in other words, exactly what we also see with the COVID-19 vaccine drives).
Note: a case can be made that the chemicals in sunscreen cause skin cancer, and likewise some evidence exists for this with certain cosmetic products on the market.
So where is the evidence that Melanoma is not caused by the sun?
What’s critically important to understand about melanoma is that while it’s widely considered to be linked to sunlight exposure—it’s not. For example:
• A study of 528 patients with melanoma found those who had solar elastosis (a common change in the skin that follows excessive sun exposure) were 60% less likely to die from melanoma.
• 87% of all SCC cases occur in regions of the body that have significant sunlight exposure, such as the face (which in total comprises 6.2% of its surface area), while 82.5% of BCC occur in those regions. Conversely, only 22% of melanomas occur in these regions. This indicates that SCC and BCC are linked to sun exposure, but melanoma is not, and this is congruent with the fact that we constantly find them in areas that get almost no sunlight exposure.
• Outdoor workers get 3–10 times the annual UV dose that indoor workers get, yet they have lower incidences of cutaneous malignant melanoma and an odds ratio (risk) that is half that of their outdoor colleagues.
• A 1997 meta analysis of the available literature found workers with significant occupational sunlight exposure were 14% less likely to get melanoma.
If you found this interesting and valuable please share with anyone struggling with skin cancer at the moment. Please read the original article. There is much much more to the story and it is a valuable source of great information on this topic.
Here is the link again.
There is a pretty tight correlation between skin cancer rates and the increased use of industrial seed oils. These toxic oils went from non-existent to widely used in a very short time and skin cancer rates tagged right along. There are some theories for why (inflammation and such). I haven't time to dig out articles right now, but you can find them easily.
Edit: OK, this is a good one: https://reallytanman.substack.com/p/seed-oils-the-real-cause-of-skin
Good policy getting the healthy sun exposure and ditching the sunglasses. Barefoot is great too (also barefoot shoes). If using sunscreen - use a physical barrier like the old fashioned zinc cream that forms a white shield. (not the invisible nano-particle stuff) Avoid seed oils.
Be careful ignoring BCC's - if you've ever seen an advanced Rodent Ulcer - very nasty.