Seborrheic Keratoses / "Senile Barnacles"

What the heck is that?

Since summer is here and with it comes trips to the pool, lake, beach, etc. as well as friends and loved ones pointing at things on your body and encouraging you to ask your doctor about them. The most common one I typically see is a harmless one called a seborrheic keratosis and I wanted to give a little information about these courtesy of our dermatologists.

Seborrheic keratoses are common, harmless, wart-like growths. They usually begin to appear in the 30's and 40's and increase in number with advancing age. The individual lesions may grow slowly in size and thickness. They frequently look as though they were stuck on the surface of the skin. They occur most frequently on the trunk, face, and under the breasts, but they can appear anywhere on the skin. Some people have only a few of these growths, while others may have several dozen.

The cause of seborrheic keratoses is not known. They are not warts and are not caused by sunlight. The tendency to develop seborrheic keratoses is inherited.

Seborrheic keratoses do not tend to go away by themselves. Because they are completely harmless and do not change into skin cancer, treatment is not medically necessary. If you want to have them removed because you do not like the way they look or feel, you can have them removed - for a fee - by your doctor or in the Cosmetic Dermatology department.

Here is some more information for you about seborrheic keratoses, what they are and how/when we treat them.

Multivitamins

If you can get the lid off, you probably don't need them When I ask people if they are taking any vitamins, herbs or supplements, many people will say they are taking a multivitamin. When I ask them why they take it, I get a quizzical look most of the time. I think this is something that resonates from childhood and parental advice of the idea that we need vitamins to help our body develop. I'm not pediatrician so I can't speak to the effects on the developing child, but I will say that most non-pregnant adults without major medical conditions do not need extra vitamins. You'll be impressed by these labels promising 120%, 300%, 1200% of your daily dose of vitamin whatever it is, but the truth is that for most of these vitamins, if you take more than your daily dose your body needs, the rest just ends up in your urine. You are literally peeing money away in this case. There's been a new trendy vitamin every decade or so for the last 40-50 years; First it...

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...

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...

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