Different Types of Skin Cancer

Watch Dr. John Sanders, DO discusses 2 main types of skin cancers and how to detect them.

Transcription
Dr. Sanders: Hi this is Dr. Sanders from Voyage Direct Primary Care. Today I wanted to talk about skin cancers, there are two main categories of skin cancers. You’ve got the pigmented and the non-pigmented skin cancers. This means the dark ones and the non-dark ones. The pigmented ones are the major ones that we’re mostly concerned about, that would be the melanomas of the world. Melanoma, you have your A. B, C, D, Es of Melanoma: asymmetry, irregular borders, lots of color in it, diameter greater than four millimeters, and evolving or changing.

If you have a dark skin legion that’s manifesting any of these things, you want to definitely get those looked at. One of the benefits of Voyage Direct Primary Care is that I have negotiated pricing on the pathology piece, so I can do the incision in my office and we can send that to pathology typically with insurance it’s about $250, with us it’s about $70, so that’s fantastic savings there.

The non-pigmented skin lesions are going to be scarnel cell and basal cell carcinoma. While they sound scary, they’re not very scary. They’re just disfiguring, so the sooner the better you detect them, but they don’t metastasize to all parts of your body and cause death and things like that like melanoma does. 

I hope this helps you understand skin cancers better. Voyage Direct Primary Care, I’m Dr. Sanders.