lonebadger6
Active Member
165 messages
joined Oct 2018
With non-melanoma skin cancers, the mortality rate sits at roughly 0.5%, which honestly means you’d have to be almost impossibly reckless to actually lose your life to those specific types...
When we look at melanoma in developed countries like the US, the five-year survival rate is about 91%—meaning 91% of people are still around, usually in pretty good shape, after five years pass.
If the melanoma is localized, the survival rate is basically 100%...
For metastatic cases, though, things shift; you're looking at an 85% survival rate if it's just in one or two nearby lymph nodes, but that drops to under 15% once it hits distant parts of the body.
In plain English—obsessing over every little spot isn't going to save you, because you aren't going to die from melanoma, but you will certainly spend your entire life living in a state of pure panic...
All you really need to do is check yourself once a month, and then see a dermatologist every three to twelve months depending on your specific skin type.
The bottom line is that all it takes to stay safe is making sure you don't ignore a weird change or convince yourself an existing mole will just "go away" on its own. If everyone in America just did regular checkups and actually took their health seriously, almost nobody would die from melanoma...
