The most common type of skin cancers are basal-cell carcinomas, squamous-cell carcinomas, and melanomas.
Basal-cell carcinomas are not dangerous, they don’t tend to spread. They do cause a lot of destruction. They can eat a part of your face off, or your nose, or your ear. They’re very treatable, particularly when you catch them very early. You need to watch out for something that looks like a pimple that won’t heal, that seems to come back in the same exact spot. That could be a skin cancer.
Squamous-cell carcinoma is the second most common type of cancer that we see. They come in three different varieties: well-differentiated, moderately-differentiated, and poorly-differentiated. Most of them fortunately are the well-differentiated types that are not generally dangerous, and mimic basal-cell carcinomas as to how they behave. So those things can look like a wart that won’t heal, or rapidly grows.
Then of course there are melanomas, that are the most dangerous types of the common skin cancers that we see. So you have to watch for any mole that changes in color, shape or size. Anything that has an irregular shape.
We go by the “A, B, C, D, Es”:
Asymmetry
Border Irregularity
Color Variation
Diameter – pencil eraser size or bigger
Evolution
Know what these are, and monitor your skin. And you need to have someone check your back because you can’t see back there, and that’s a common place for melanomas.
