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Hello, my name is Dr. Susan Jewell, on behalf of Expert Village I'm going to talk to you
about signs of skin cancer. Now in this clip I'm going to talk about questions to ask your
doctor if you have been diagnosed with skin cancer. It's always good to have prepared
a list of questions to ask when you're going back to follow up with the doctor before you
go into procedure for a biopsy. Now one of the questions would you like to ask your doctor?
Now consider these questions, when you see the doctor you think, you have to ask him
what type of biopsy do you recommend and why, because as I mentioned in a previous clip,
there are several different types of biopsies a doctor would do when he suspects that you
might have skin cancer. The next question you can consider to ask is, "how will the
biopsy be performed?". Because biopsy can be done either in a clinic or in a hospital.
Now, if you have to go to the hospital, the question is, "do I have to go to the hospital
and how long will the stay will be in the hospital, is it an overnight stay, is it more
than you know one night or two nights? What are the risks of the procedure? And will I
get scarring, and if I do what type of scarring, and how will it heal, and what would it look
like? And then if he just tells you that, yes, that you are going to go to a particular
biopsy or procedure, how long will the procedure take. And of course, with some of the procedures,
if it's going to be in the office in a doctor's clinic it's going to be a lot shorter than
if it's going to be happening in a hospital when you're doing a overnight procedure. Then
when you actually have the procedure done, you need to ask the doctor how soon will I
obtain the results and who will give me the results? Will it be the doctor himself or
will it be the pathologist? Now, these are the questions you should really think about,
make a list of before you see the doctor. So any time that you suspect you have a lesion
on your skin that is new, that you've never noticed before or you see changes in your
moles or skin tags on your body, then I always recommend that you follow that up and consult
with a dermatologist or your doctor. Now, the key to skin cancer is early diagnosis
prevention, early detection.