Untangling Dermatology’s Massive Skin Cancer Scam
I always found it odd that everyone insisted I avoid sunlight and wear sunscreen during outdoor activities, as I noticed that sunlight felt great and caused my veins to dilate, indicating the body deeply craved sunlight
Later, I learned that blocking natural light with glass (e.g., with windows or eyeglasses) significantly affected health, and that many had benefitted from utilizing specialized glass that allowed the full light spectrum through.
This ties into one of my favorite therapeutic modalities, ultraviolet blood irradiation, which produces a wide range of truly remarkable benefits by putting the sun’s ultraviolet light inside the body.
Once in medical school, aware of sunlight’s benefits, I was struck by dermatologists’ extreme aversion to it. Patients were constantly warned to avoid sunlight, and in northern latitudes, where people suffer from seasonal affective disorder, dermatologists even required students to wear sunscreen and cover most of their bodies indoors.
At this point my perspective changed to “This crusade against the sun is definitely coming from the dermatologists” and “What on earth is wrong with these people?”
The Monopolization of Medicine
Throughout my life, I’ve noticed the medical industry will:
•Promote healthy activities people are unlikely to do (e.g., exercising or quitting smoking).
•Promote unhealthy activities industries make money from (e.g., eating processed foods or taking a myriad of harmful pharmaceuticals).
•Attack beneficial activities that are easy to do (e.g., sunbathing or consuming egg yolks, butter and raw dairy).
Much of this issue appears rooted in the controversial history of the American Medical Association (AMA). In 1899, the struggling organization revitalized itself by offering the AMA seal of approval to manufacturers who simply disclosed their ingredients and advertised in AMA publications.
This strategy boosted AMA’s advertising revenue fivefold and its physician membership ninefold in a decade. For example, the AMA widely encouraged cigarette smoking, even when it was known to be dangerous.
The AMA then monopolized medicine by establishing a general medical education council, that allowed them to become the national accrediting body for medical schools, effectively eliminating the teaching of competing medical practices like homeopathy, chiropractic, naturopathy, and, to a lesser extent, osteopathy, as states often denied licenses to graduates from “low-rated” schools.
The AMA then further solidified this monopoly by having the media widely promote AMA campaigns against “medical quackery” (e.g., treatments they couldn’t buy the rights to) and mobilizing the FDA or FTC against competitors.
Many remarkable medical innovations hence were successfully erased from history and part of my life’s work (which I am slowly trying to introduce here) and much of what I use in practice are the therapies the AMA erased from history.
These monopolistic tactics never stopped. For example, after Dr. Pierre Kory testified to the Senate about using ivermectin to treat COVID-19, he faced intense media and professional backlash.
Professor William B. Grant, then emailed Kory, stating that the same thing had been done to vitamin D research for decades.
The Benefits of Sunlight
One of the oldest proven therapies in medicine is sunlight exposure, which effectively treated the 1918 influenza, tuberculosis, and various other diseases. The success of sunbathing even inspired the development of ultraviolet blood irradiation.
Given its safety, effectiveness, free availability and lack of a lobbyist to protect it, it’s hence plausible that those aiming to monopolize medicine would seek to restrict public access to it.
Medicine’s campaign against sunlight has been so effective that many are unaware of its benefits, including:
- Mental Health: Sunlight is crucial for mental well-being, notably in conditions like seasonal affective disorder, but its benefits extend further, as unnatural light exposure disrupts circadian rhythms.
- Cancer Prevention: A large epidemiological study discovered that women with higher solar UVB exposure had half the incidence of breast cancer, and men half the incidence of fatal prostate cancer. This 50 percent reduction greatly exceeds the effectiveness of current prevention and treatment approaches. Likewise, artificial light has been repeatedly observed to worsen cancer outcomes.
- Longevity and Heart Health: A 20 year prospective study of 29,518 Swedish women found that sunlight avoiders were 60 percent more likely to die overall (and 130 percent more likely to die than the highest sun exposure group). Notably, smokers who got sunlight had the same mortality risk as non-smokers who avoided the sun as the greatest benefit of sunlight exposure is a reduction in death from cardiovascular disease.
Note: the link between losing natural light and conditions such as infertility, diabetes, cancer, poor circulation, depression, ADHD, and poor academic performance is discussed further here.
Skin Cancer
According to the American Academy of Dermatology, skin cancer is the most common cancer in the United States, with current estimates suggesting that one in five Americans will develop skin cancer in their lifetime.
Approximately 9,500 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with skin cancer every day.
The Academy emphasizes that UV exposure is the most preventable risk factor for skin cancer, advising people to avoid indoor tanning beds and protect their skin outdoors by seeking shade, wearing protective clothing, and applying broad-spectrum sunscreen with an SPF of 30 or higher.
The Skin Cancer Foundation states that more than two people die of skin cancer in the U.S. every hour, which sounds alarming. Let’s break down what all this means.
Basal Cell Carcinoma
Basal cell carcinoma (BCC) is the most common skin cancer, making up 80% of cases, with about 2.64 million Americans diagnosed annually. Risk factors include excessive sun exposure, fair skin, and family history.
BCC primarily occurs in sun-exposed areas like the face.
BCC rarely metastasizes and has a near 0% fatality rate, but it frequently recurs after removal. The standard excision approach often doesn’t address underlying causes, leading to repeated surgeries and potential disfigurement.
While BCCs can grow large if left untreated, they aren’t immediately dangerous. Treatment is necessary but not urgent. Alternative therapies can effectively treat large BCCs without disfiguring surgery.
Note: since the COVID-19 vaccines came out, I have heard of a few cases of BCC metastasizing in the vaccinated, but it is still extraordinarily rare.
Squamous Cell Carcinoma
Cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) is the second most common skin cancer, with an estimated 1.8 million cases in the U.S. Its incidence varies widely due to sunlight exposure, ranging from 260 to 4,970 cases per million person-years.
Previously thought to be four times less common than BCC, SCC is now only half as common.
Unlike BCC, SCC can metastasize, making it potentially dangerous. If removed before metastasis, the survival rate is 99 percent; after metastasis, it drops to 56 percent. Typically caught early, SCC has an average survival rate of 95%. Around 2,000 people die from SCC each year in the U.S.
Note: unlike more lethal skin cancers, it is not required to report BCC or SCC. Consequently, there is no centralized database tracking their occurrence, so the official figures are largely estimates.
Melanoma
Melanoma occurs at a rate of 218 cases per million persons annually in the United States, with survival rates ranging from 99 to 35 percent depending on its stage when diagnosed, averaging out to 94 percent.
However, despite only comprising 1% of all skin cancer diagnoses, Melanoma is responsible for most skin cancer deaths. In total, this works out to a bit over 8000 deaths each year in the United States.
Since survival is greatly improved by early detection, many guides online exist to help recognize the common signs of a potential melanoma.
What’s critically important to understand about melanoma is that while it’s widely considered to be linked to sunlight exposure—but it’s not.
For example:
- Patients with solar elastosis, a sign of sun exposure, were 60% less likely to die from melanoma.
- Melanoma predominantly occurs in areas of the body with minimal sunlight exposure, unlike SCC and BCC, which are linked to sun-exposed regions.
- Outdoor workers, despite significantly higher UV exposure, have lower rates of melanoma compared to indoor workers.
- Many sunscreens contain toxic carcinogens (to the point Hawaii banned them to protect coral reefs). Conversely, existing research indicates widespread sunscreen use has not reduced skin cancer rates, and in some cases increases it (e.g., a 2023 UK study of over 470,000 people found that frequent sunscreen use was associated with a 1.9-to-3.9-fold increased risk across all four skin cancers studied—BCC, SCC, melanoma in-situ, and invasive melanoma).
Note: It’s worth pausing on how the 2023 study’s authors handled their own result. Having found that frequent sunscreen use tracked with more skin cancer, they did not consider that their model might be wrong. Instead they labeled it a “paradox,” proposed that sunscreen users must be getting more sun, or not reapplying enough, or buying sunscreen after their diagnosis, and then concluded the data “demonstrate the importance of adequate and frequent sunscreen use.” This is the same reflex behind the “French paradox,” the puzzle of why the French have less heart disease despite eating more saturated fat, which was only ever a paradox if you assumed saturated fat caused heart disease to begin with (an assumption resting on a far shakier foundation than the public was led to believe, as I covered in my article on the manufactured war on cholesterol that was used to push toxic and ineffective—but lucrative—statins upon everyone).
- A mouse study designed to study malignant melanoma found mice kept under simulated daylight develop tumors at a slower and diminished rate compared to those under cool white fluorescent light.
- There has been a significant increase in many areas from melanoma, something which argues against sunlight being the primary issue as it has not significantly changed in the last few decades. For instance, consider this data from Norway’s cancer registry on malignant melanoma:
Note: in addition to these three cancers, other (much rarer) skin cancers also exist, most of which have not been linked to sunlight exposure.
The Great Dermatology Scam
If you consider the previous section, the following should be fairly clear:
•By far the most common “skin cancer” is not dangerous.
•The “skin cancers” you actually need to worry about are a fairly small portion of the existing skin cancers.
• Sunlight exposure does not cause the most dangerous cancers.
In essence, there’s no way to justify “banning sunlight” to “prevent skin cancer,” as the “benefit” from this prescription is vastly outweighed by its harm.
However, a very clever linguistic trick bypasses this contradiction—a single label, “skin cancer,” is used for everything, which then selectively adopts the lethality of melanoma, the frequency of BCC, and the sensitivity to sunlight that BCC and SCC have.
This has always really infuriated me, so I’ve given a lot of thought to why they do this.
Note: since the pharmaceutical industry ultimately revolves around drug sales rather than drug development (e.g., significantly more is spent on marketing than drug development1,2,3,4) you will routinely see clever but deceptive linguistic tricks used to promote a wide swathe of drugs.
The Transformation of Dermatology
In the 1980s, dermatology was one of the least desirable specialties in medicine (e.g., dermatologists were often referred to as pimple poppers). Now however, dermatology is one of the most coveted specialties in medicine as dermatologists make two to four times as much money as a regular doctor, but have a much less stressful lifestyle.
A relatively unknown blog (Robert Yoho uncovered1) by Dermatologist David J. Elpern, M.D. at last explained what happened:
Over the past 40 years, I have witnessed these changes in my specialty and am dismayed by the reluctance of my colleagues to address them. This trend began in the early 1980s when the Academy of Dermatology (AAD) assessed its members over 2 million dollars to hire a prominent New York advertising agency to raise the public’s appreciation of our specialty. The mad men recommended “educating” the public to the fact that dermatologists are skin cancer experts, not just pimple poppers; and so the free National Skin Cancer Screening Day was established [through a 1985 Presidential proclamation].
These screenings serve to inflate the public’s health anxiety about skin cancer and led to the performance of vast amounts of expensive low-value procedures for skin cancer and actinic keratosis (AKs). At the same time, pathologists were expanding their definitions of what a melanoma is, leading to “diagnostic drift” that misleadingly increased the incidence of melanoma while the mortality has remained at 1980 levels. Concomitantly, non-melanoma skin cancers are being over-treated by armies of micrographic surgeons who often treat innocuous skin cancers with unnecessarily aggressive, lucrative surgeries.
A 2021 journal article provides additional context to Dr. Elpern’s remarks:
Skin cancer screenings began at the community level in the 1970s. The first nationwide public skin cancer screening program was started by the American Academy of Dermatology in 1985 after the rising incidence and mortality rate of malignant melanoma gained increasing attention in the early 1980s. In the early years of the program, President Ronald Reagan signed proclamations creating the “National Skin Cancer Prevention and Detection Week,” and the “Older Americans Melanoma/Skin Cancer Detection and Prevention Week,” and the total body skin examination became the gold standard for skin cancer screening.
Note: this article also shares that the American government has long been extremely doubtful of the value of these screenings and the dermatology field has faced continual challenges to surmount this obstacle they’ve had to lobby for solutions to.
This heightened awareness led to a dramatic increase in skin cancer screenings and diagnoses, fueled by fears instilled in the public about sun exposure. Alongside this massive sales funnel, there was a significant expansion in the incredibly lucrative Mohs micrographic surgery, promoted as a gold standard for treating skin cancers due to its precision and efficacy in sparing healthy tissue.
However, critics (correctly) argue that Mohs surgery is often overused, driven by financial incentives rather than clinical necessity, contributing to immense healthcare costs (e.g., the rate of use of Mohs surgery among Medicare beneficiaries in the United States grew 700 percent between 1992 and 20091 in 2012 over $2 billion was paid out for Mohs surgeries1).
Conclusion
Dermatology needed a villain to justify its business model, and it chose the sun. As such, vast amounts of money were made while we were left to pay the price of being denied one of the most essential nutrients for health.
However, while these predatory practices have continued with impunity for decades, things have now changed.
COVID-19 made the medical industry’s greed too visible to ignore, and people are now questioning practices that went unchallenged for decades.
If an article like this had been published in 2018, few would have seen it, but instead, for more than two years, Dermatology’s unconscionable war against the sun has become a viral topic that is now routinely discussed in the health community and attacked by the mainstream press.
This is a historic shift and like you, I intend to do all I can to make the most of it.
See more here midwesterndoctor.com
Some bold emphasis added