Sam paddling in a canoe wearing a salmon coloured hat and a grey shirt, lilypads to the right
I’ve been worried about the sun and skin cancer for awhile now and I’ve written on the blog a fair bit about it. See here and here and here, for example. But I’ve also struggled with the push to have women dress more modestly, especially the idea that older women, and larger women, should just cover up our bodies and hide.
I’m a fan of bikinis and bike shorts and here on the blog I’ve worried about swim dresses and running skirts. But this year I hit a turning point. Another friend had a skin cancer scare. It’s also been a hotter than usual summer with blazing sun a lot of the time. There’s only so much sunscreen an active, outdoorsy person can wear.
I’ve decided I don’t care why people think I’m wearing them. I’m not ashamed of my body. I’m not trying to hide it from view. I just would like not die any earlier than I have to. Even aside from death, skin cancer isn’t much fun.
I broke down and bought two super, lightweight (very cool) outdoor active shirts and long pants for paddling. I’m wearing them in the pictures above on our recent family canoe trip. They also helped with the mosquito issue. Bonus!
I also bought a swim skirt and long sleeved rash guard shirt (spf 50) for hanging about in and around the outdoor swimming pool. They’re actually great for swimming in and for hanging around the pool having super soaker battles with a 7 year old.
I’m calling both purchases a success.
I’m also getting a mammogram on my birthday so I’m doing my bit for cancer prevention this month.
I posted on Facebook the other day about my first sunny bike ride and the need to replenish my stores of small containers of sunscreen for my bike jersey pocket.
A friend commented that she thought cyclists were more aware of the sun and its risks than were runners. Many runners, she claimed, weren’t so good about sunscreen. There’s the thought that it gets in the way of sweating properly. I’m not sure if it’s right that cyclists are better about the sun than runners though it is true we are generally out there for longer. Most cyclists don’t ride during the dark either and so a long summer ride will include lots of sunshine.
I’ve had a friend in her 30s die from melanoma, it scares me, and I’m anxious to spread the word.
Here’s some tough facts:
About Melanoma in Canada: “In its late stages, the average life expectancy for melanoma is just six months, with a one-year survival rate of only 25 percent, making metastatic melanoma one of the most aggressive forms of cancer and one of the deadliest forms of skin cancer. An estimated 6,500 Canadians will be diagnosed with melanoma this year and 1,050 will die from it. Melanoma is responsible for 70 percent of deaths associated with skin cancer.”
“1. Almost 50% of all cancer cases are a type of skin cancer.
More men and women are diagnosed with skin cancer each year than any other type of cancer. Each year, over 5 million Americans are diagnosed with skin cancer and nearly 5 million seek treatment for the disease.
People encounter these potentially harmful rays outdoors in the sun, lying in tanning beds and even sitting next to a window or driving in the car on a sunny day. UV rays can damage the skin through chronic exposure and intermittent sunburns.
Melanoma, specifically, accounts for less than two percent of skin cancer cases, yet the majority of deaths caused by skin cancer are caused by melanoma.
More women are diagnosed with melanoma before age 50; however, by age 65, men are twice as likely to be diagnosed with melanoma than women.
5. Reports of skin cancer diagnoses are considered to be underreported.
Many cases go unreported because, if caught early enough, they can be appropriately treated by primary care physicians or dermatologists, and patients do not have to undergo full cancer treatment. Despite being required by law, many doctors may not be aware that they are required to report such cases.
Americans spend approximately $4.8 billion for non-melanoma and $3.3 billion for melanoma annually.
7. Skin cancer treatment can cost each patient anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars.
The cost of treatment largely varies and depends on the type and stage of the cancer as well as the depth and location of the affected areas. For example, the average cost of excising a small area affected by non-melanoma skin cancer in a physician’s office is approximately$500, but, if needed, chemotherapy may cost thousands of dollars a month. These costs do not include reconstructive surgery that some patients may opt for post-treatment.
Those with fair or lighter skin are more likely to be affected by skin cancer; however, those with darker skin may be at a greater risk because skin cancer is more likely to go undetected until advance stages.
The highest risk exists for people who use tanning beds before age 25. Their odds of developing squamous cell skin cancer is 50% higher than those who have never used indoor tanning before; similarly, their risk of developing basal cell skin cancer is 40% higher.
10. Skin cancer is one of the most preventable and treatable cancers.
Minimizing exposure to sunlight and tanning beds can help you protect yourself from skin cancer and scheduling annual checkups with a dermatologist can be a good way to monitor suspicious-looking moles or diagnose skin cancer early. Performing self-examination can also be helpful. Consider keeping photographic records of certain areas that your doctor has asked you to monitor for future comparison. When detected early, skin cancer has more than a 95% cure rate.”
What’s the biggest single factor that puts you at risk for ignoring your health? Being a man.
Sociologist Lisa Wade, interviewed in New York Magazine, says that “some scholars argue that being male is the single strongest predictor of whether a person will take health risks.”
Men like risk it turns out. Most of them also hate putting lotion on their skin (too girly) and being afraid of things (not manly). They are also more likely to have outdoor jobs and do household tasks that involve being outside the house. Think lawn mowing and BBQ-ing. They also pay less attention to their skin and so don’t catch early warning signs.
Women, generally speaking, don’t mind lotions, do pay attention to changes in our skin, wear sunscreen to avoid premature aging and wrinkles, and often also wear make up year round that contains ingredients that protect skin from the sun.
Male socialization in this case leads to bad results for men. Women, thanks to a different set of gender norms, fare better.
This combination of factors is part of the explanation as to why men between the ages of 15 to 39 are more than twice as likely to die of melanoma than women of that age. According to the American Academy of Dermatology melanoma will kill 6,470 men this year — and half as many women.
“Advocates and researchers are currently trying to figure out how to better get the message across to dudes that they really need to slather on the SPF, and last week Wade came across an unlikely solution: the marketing teams that create what Wade calls “pointlessly gendered products.”Usually, Wade writes about such products — like gendered packages of mixed nuts, glue sticks, and even vegetables — with a mixture of snark and incredulousness. But when she came across Banana Boat sunscreen for men last week, she couldn’t help but write a “reluctant defense” of the product.
“Sunscreen is a category of lotion and so putting on sunscreen is equivalent to admitting you’re the sun’s bitch,” she writes. “In fact, thanks in part to the stupid idea that lotion carries girl cooties, men are two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with skin cancer. So, fine, dudes, here’s some sunscreen for men. For christ’s sake.”
Maybe for my teen boys they need an Axe of the sunscreen world? I was amused to see they know have sunscreen especially for tattoos. See http://www.coppertone.com/products/speciality/tattoguard/spray.aspx even though the Canadian Cancer Society says any full spectrum, high SPF sunscreen will do the trick. The “just for tattoos” stuff looks cooler and I’m sure ounce for ounce, it’s pricier. But whatever.
The sunscreen avoidance and skin cancer risk isn’t the only health problem men face.
“On average, men aren’t as healthy as women. Men don’t live as long, and they’re more likely to engage in risky behaviors, like smoking and drinking. But in the past decade, global health funding has focused heavily on women. Programs and policies for men have been “notably absent,” says Sarah Hawkes from the University of London’s Institute of Global Health.”
“It’s cool to be a man that smokes and drinks — who drives a fast motorbike, or fast cars,” she says. “If you were really serious about saving lives, you would spend money tackling unhealthy gender norms” that promote these risky behaviors.”
See also 10 bad health habits of men. The list includes the usual: smoking, drinking, fast food, not seeing a doctor regularly, stress, keeping everything bottled in.
Men lead shorter lives than women and some moral philosophers think we ought to be more concerned than we are about this inequality. There are a number of ways in which men’s lives lead to early deaths, stress, yes, but also death in war time, and dangerous jobs such as mining and construction. Men are disproportionately represented in the prison population as well.
(I’ve written a bit before about men’s health. See The unsafe sex where I address some of these arguments.)
When thinking about inequality moral philosophers like to divide up inequalities that are the result of circumstance and luck, from ones that follow from choice. We think individuals are responsible for inequalities that are their own choosing. Sure smokers die young, for example, but that’s a trade off they’ve made.
It’s tempting to put men’s deaths from sun related skin cancer that category.
“Don’t be an idiot! Just wear the damn sunscreen!”
That I can hear cry in my own voice is part of the reason that married men, or men with female partners anyway, live longer. They’re nagged into healthy habits and visit the doctor more often. Now I should say that the person I’m in the best position to nag on this front doesn’t need it, not where sunscreen is concerned. As the result of a scare in his twenties, after growing up a fair skinned, freckled redhead, racing sailboats on the ocean, he was an early adopter of hats, gloves, long sleeves, and serious sunscreen.
Maybe it’s that I’m now parenting teenage boys but I can see how strong gender role socialization is for boys. It’s okay to wear a helmet because “my parents are crazy when it comes helmets. They’ll ground me forever if I ride without one” but not okay to do it because you’re worried about hitting your head.
Note that when young women acquire unhealthy habits, dieting, for example, as a result of female socialization feminists aren’t so quick to dismiss it as a matter of individual choice. Feminists can, and should, take male gender role socialization just as seriously. Indeed, I think feminism offers the best explanation of some of the inequalities that hurt men.
Skin cancer is on the rise in Canada, dramatically so. And we’re emerging from a particularly brutal winter so it can be hard to believe that the sun is our enemy. I think Canadians tend to not pay attention to skin cancer and sun because much of our year is so dark and cold. When I was cycling in Australia I was struck by the absence of sleeveless cycling jerseys. No one wore them. Not just because of silly cycling fashion rules either. They often wore full sleeve jerseys in the summer and/or white arm covers that protect you from the sun.
Here’s a blog post on arm coolers, as they’re called. They are designed for use in extreme heat and sun and have a high SPF and are supposed to help keep your arms cool. The post just mentioned reviews several brands but I haven’t seen them at all out on the road in Canada.
In Australia it wasn’t a joking matter. In pretty much every group of cyclists I met, there was someone being treated for skin cancer. (On the beach in Australia I was struck by two camps, the little children dressed in full length top and bottom bathing suits that looked kind of “hazmat” like, with hats, always with hats, and the older people, both men and women, in tiny teeny speedo style suits.)
Now here in cold, dark Canada I have a few friends with cancer and the norms are starting to change.
Skin cancer, one of the most preventable forms of the disease, is also one of the fastest-rising in this country, according to a new report from the Canadian Cancer Society that notes the death rate for all cancers combined continues to fall for most age groups.
“Melanoma is certainly increasing more than nearly all other cancers,” said Frances Wright, the head of breast and melanoma surgery at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. “They [rates] are increasing rapidly and it’s probably related to behaviour, related to lack of sun protection.”
When it comes to malignant melanoma – the type of skin cancer that is likelier to spread and kill – the rate of new cases has climbed significantly over the past 25 years. So has the melanoma death rate. Only lung cancer deaths in women and liver cancer deaths in men have increased at a faster pace, according to Canadian Cancer Statistics 2014, the annual compendium of cancer figures and projections published by the Canadian Cancer Society, Statistics Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada.
The report, released Wednesday, estimates 6,500 new cases of malignant melanoma will be diagnosed this year, with 1,050 expected to die from the disease.
I’ve been aware of the risk of skin cancer for a long time. Here at the B-F household we had our wake up call early. My partner Jeff had some pre-cancerous lesions on his hands in his twenties from years of sailboat racing. He was told to wear a hat and sunscreen at all times and signed me up for that plan along the way. Later we had some incredibly fair skinned children, of the sort who burned after minutes in the sun. We bought them full body bathing suits and big hats too.
An aside: This why whenever Tracy mentions nude vacations as an antidote to body image woes and as fun in their own right, my first thought goes to buckets of sunscreen. I rarely sit on the beach, even with all my clothes on! And then I think about a forested nude holiday, hiking in the woods maybe, and then I think about mosquitoes and tics. The fact is I’m happy with nudity and I love the outdoors but for me, I don’t see the two mixing. The World Naked Bike Ride isn’t for me.
But still, even after I adapted to the ways of the sun avoiders, I had some false beliefs about tanning.
I once had an argument with my thesis supervisor in the Philosophy department lounge over whether it was okay to go out in the sun for short period of time once you were tanned, and if you didn’t burn. He insisted that it was never okay and that a tan was just evidence of sun damage. One should never feel good about having tanned. He liked to argue, he was very good at arguing, he was married to a medical professional, and he directed me to Cancer Society resources.
Of course he was right.
The Centre for Disease Control says that “tanning does not protect against sunburn. In fact, a tan only provides a sun protection factor (SPF) of about 3 (CDC recommends sunscreen with an SPF of at least 15.), so a tan does not provide enough protection against the sun. The important thing to remember is that a tan is a response to injury: skin cells respond to damage from UV rays by producing more pigment.”
What about vitamin D? I rely on the Canadian Cancer Society for advice. (This is an area where paying attention to the credibility of online sources is particularly important as many are funded by the indoor tanning industry.) The cancer society says our vitamin D needs are easily met with a few minutes of indirect sunlight a day and that tanning is never recommended. Their slogan is “a little sun goes a long way” and they recommend Vitamin D supplements–never artificial tanning–in the winter.
Cyclists joke lots about our tan lines. I confess I use a lot of sunscreen (on my face year round, in fact) but I also use fake tanning lotion to avoid the pale legs thing. I feel bad about that as it perpetuates the summer tan norm but I can’t shake my dislike of my legs without.
In the last three decades, more people have had skin cancer than all other cancers combined, according to data from the Skin Cancer Foundation. And between 2000 and 2009, cases of melanoma (the deadliest form of the disease) rose steadily by almost 2 percent a year. It’s also the most common type of cancer in people ages 25 to 29.
Numerous studies have shown that regular exposure to ultraviolet radiation from the sun leads to an increased risk of melanoma and that outdoor endurance athletes are particularly susceptible to skin cancers. While there is little research on cyclists specifically, we are clearly vulnerable given the sheer amount of time they spend outside, says Prentice Steffen, MD, physician for Team Garmin-Sharp. One study published in the journal Dermatology found that during eight stages of the Tour de Suisse, riders were exposed to levels of harmful UV radiation that were 30 times more than recommended limits. Several factors compound the risk, say experts, including sweat, which increases the skin’s sensitivity to UV radiation.
Less worrisome but just as sobering, a staggering 90 percent of skin changes—like the fine lines and wrinkles that we attribute to just getting older—are caused by the sun.
I can attest to the age point. In visiting Australia and New Zealand I was constantly mistaken for a much younger person. And judging from the condition of the skin around me and the ages of my friends there, I don’t think they were joking. That too has prompted me to keep slathering on sunscreen and wearing nerdy sun hats. When prudence and vanity point in the same direction, it’s an easy choice. I might even order arm coolers this year.
I posted on Facebook the other day about my first sunny bike ride and the need to replenish my stores of small containers of sunscreen for my bike jersey pocket.
