How should people with dark skin check for skin cancer?

Source: ABC Everyday, January 2022

I won’t lie to you. Growing up, I thought of sunburn and skin cancer as “white people problems".

In my defence, I very rarely burned. And back then, I thought your tendency to burn was the only thing that mattered when it came to skin cancer risk.

I don’t recall ever receiving information on skin cancer or sunburn that was tailored to people of colour in school.

So it was only in the last few years that I learned sunscreen is important for people of colour, too: the Australian Cancer Council recommends everyone wear sunscreen everyday on days when the UV Index is forecast to be above three.

It’s also only recently that I’ve learned people with “dark" skin (dermatologists tend to define this as “type four" and above on the Fitzpatrick scale) like me can develop skin cancer, even if it happens to us a lot less often than it does to people with light skin.

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