58 South Bay Accent COURTESY OF EL CAMINO HOSPITAL “Here in California, if you walk around with a cigarette, someone is bound to give you a dirty look. Maybe one day if you’re lying out in the sun without any protection, you’ll get a dirty look, too.” — d r . s h y a m a l i m a l l i c k s i n g h a l perature. But particularly with younger patients, fault decidedly shifts indoors. If you thought tanning salons went the way of the 1980s, think again. A 2014 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey of American teens found that about 20 percent of high school girls and 5 percent of high school boys had used indoor tanning facilities in the past year. Ten percent of the girls had gone more than 10 times that year. And they are paying the price. “The biggest and most common misconception related to skin cancer is that it only happens to elderly people,” says Joe Gorelick, a dermatology industry consultant and nurse practitioner with California Skin Institute in San Jose. “The age distribution of patients is expanding to include younger patients.” Tanya Hawkins is 21 and a senior in college. A petite blonde, Hawkins attended a well-known Silicon Valley private high school, where she played outdoor sports and worked hard to keep up her grades in a demanding environment. For relaxation, she developed a weekend routine: She’d head inside to tan. “It became a bit of an addiction,” Hawkins says. “It felt really good, and I looked great. It never occurred to me that it wasn’t a smart thing to do until a friend of mine kept haranguing me because she knew a guy who died from melanoma in his 20s. This scared me, so I finally quit. Now I look back and wonder what I did to myself, particularly since I am naturally so pale.” Tanning salons promise a warm, fashionable glow in a matter of minutes, with no sand, surf or lotion required. Yet just one indoor UV tanning session is enough to increase the likelihood of melanoma by 20 percent, and additional sessions worsen the odds, according to the Skin Cancer Foundation. Tanning beds also can double your chance of developing non-melanoma skin cancer. The CDC estimates that more than 400,000 cases of skin cancer are related annually to indoor tanning in the U.S. “It’s not if, but when, you will get skin cancer,” warns Ko, speaking of habitual tanning bed usage. “It is such a risk; the effects can’t be minimized.” At tanning salons, Ko adds, because the heat source is much closer to the body and of great intensity “probably one session is equal to a full day at the beach.” The good news is that the latest CDC
South Bay Accent - Apr/May 2015
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