Skip to main content

sunscreen

I Todl You To Wear Sunscreen - Meme

These days I spend a lot of time looking at how the sun can lay waste to healthy skin over the years, freezing off early skin cancers and sending people to see dermatologists for potential advanced skin cancers.  I hear a lot of "we didn't have sunscreen back then" but I know that a) sunscreen has been on the market since the mid 1930's and b) truth be told, I spent a lot of my childhood in the summers outside all day at camp in Middle of Nowhere, TX, basically lying to my mom about putting on sunscreen and I can't imagine that kids were any more responsible than that in prior generations (but I'm sure I'll get some emails from a few of y'all who see things differently).

So all that said, we are into summer now and it's time to regain a healthy respect for that giant star in the sky.

- A little bit of sun is good for vitamin D and the mood and not tripping over things in the dark.  Too much is bad, specifically, too much ultraviolet (UV) light as we get protected from a lot of the worse stuff by the atmosphere, such as brain-destroying cosmic rays (more here about why you don't want to be an astronaut).

- UV light is just a little too short of a wavelength to see and comes in 2 spectrums:  UV-A and UV-B.

- UV-B is what most of us think of with sun damage because it is the type that causes sunburns and some skin cancers.  These are most prominent between 10 am and 4 pm in Spring and Summer and are the type that bounce off snow and ice and don't generally go through glass.

- UV-A rays make up about 95% of all the UV rays we're exposed to.  It goes through clouds and glass, is present basically all the time when there is light, causes skin aging/wrinkling and also probably skin cancers.  It is a little longer and so penetrates deeper into the skin.  This is the type mainly used in tanning booths too.

- You should be looking for a sunscreen that says "broad spectrum" and "if used as directed with other sun-protection measures, decreases the risk of skin cancer and early skin aging caused by the sun."  These are FDA phrases meaning that those sunscreens effectively block both UV-A & UV-B.

- Water-resistant or sweat-resistant sunscreens wear off after 40 minutes of being in the water or 80 minutes of sweating.  Then you need to reapply.  And yes I know that's tougher when your wet and sticky, but most things are.  Generally you should reapply every 2 hours if you're still out in the sun.

- SPF or Sun Protection Factor of sunscreens applies to how much UV-B they absorb (there's no rating system for UV-A absorption in America).  SPF 15/30/50 absorb 93%/97%/98% so it's generally recommended to get at least SPF 30.

- The teaspoon rule was designed because we do a terrible job of putting on enough sunscreen.  You're aiming to use 1 tsp on your face/neck, 1 on your back, 1 on your torso, 1 tsp on each arm and 2 tsps on each leg.  And if you're missing coverage on your head, you need to hit that too or else get a nice looking hat.  Research has shown that people don't like wearing ugly hats, unless you're English royalty.

- Timing is key - you need to put on the sunscreen 15-30 minutes before sun exposure in order for it to work and ideally waiting a few minutes before getting dressed so it doesn't all end up on your clothes.  My neighbor always puts his on 20 seconds before getting in the water.  I tell him it would be quicker, more fun and as effective to just chuck the tube of sunscreen in the water.  Then he makes fun of doctors.  It's a complicated relationship.

- Dermatologists aren't fans of the spray-on sunscreens because the spray can miss a lot of spots on the skin and not be as well absorbed.  There are also some concerns about the stuff in them and how it could effect your skin.

- You can look at the daily UV Index to figure out how protective you need to be but generally in California it's pretty high and we should be on full alert.  Ideally you want to be using photoprotection (clothing) during the peak hours of sun exposure, mostly between 10 am and 4 pm, and this means staying in the shade and using sun-protective clothing and generously applying broad spectrum SPF 30+ sunscreen every 2 hours, even on cloudy days, and after swimming or sweating.  And remember that sand, water and snow reflect UV rays and can increase your exposure.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

NSAIDs

Advil and Motrin are ibuprofen, then you have Aleve (naproxen).  Those are the over-the-counter ones.  Prescriptions are Mobic (meloxicam), nabumetone, indomethacin, Toradol (ketorolac), diclofenac, Lodine, and the list goes on.  All of these medications are in a class called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). I'm giving you this list because there is mounting evidence that these medications a) don't work as well as we'd thought and b) have some very serious long term side effects we're finding out more about. NSAID's act by reducing the amount of prostaglandins you make in order to reduce inflammation.  However, prostaglandins have a ton of other effects and are involved in the maintenance of just about AIDs and also stronger if they are taken every day and/or around-the-clock.  every other organ system that you have.  The effect is stronger with higher doses of NS NSAID's work best and are best indicated for times when something is r...
Read more

Kidney Stones

I've written about this previously , but it's often hard to explain to people what a 10 is on the "1-10" pain scale if they haven't been in that spot before.  For women who have had children, they generally know what a 10 is, but for men it's a little harder.  When I was a medical student on my psychiatry rotation, we had a patient calmly sitting there saying his pain level was at a 10 and our resident, who was an ex-military sniper with a large skull tattoo on his forearm and a crosshair through the eye, calmly leaned forward and asked, "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you could not be in more pain than you are now, correct?"  The patient changed his answer. Getting to the point, a kidney stone is about the close I can come to describing a 10/10 pain to people who haven't gone through childbirth.  The fundamental issue is similar - your body is trying to move a big solid thing through an opening that was not really desig...
Read more

Pain

Sorry to be a pain I would say about 90% of the comments I hear from people about their pain threshold is that they think they have a high pain tolerance.  Which is statistically impossible unless I just attract people who have a high pain tolerance. We traditionally ask people to rate their pain on a 1-10/10 scale and while we hear a lot of 9's and 10's, I would say that, having been present for a number of them, a 10/10 would be giving birth to a first child.  For those who haven't experienced that, my old psychiatry resident described it as "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you would not be in any more pain than you are now" (he was also a former Marine sniper which might explain that). But this is pretty pervasive throughout the medical system and got me wondering as to how people's understanding of what their pain threshold was matched up to what it really was.  Fortunately, there were researchers who had a yen to poke peopl...
Read more