Dr. Faith T. Fitzgerald, vice chairman and program director for the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of California Medical Center in Sacramento, opposes measures that legislate behavior. There has recently been much in both lay and medical literature on the promotion of healthy lifestyles. Central to it, I believe, is the concept that a lifestyle is something one chooses, and life is something that happens to one. This distinction will affect the future of medicine, and certainly health care reform, in this country. The emphasis on healthy lifestyle, although salutary in may ways, has a very dark side to it and has led to the increasing peril of a tyranny of health in the United States.
Skin is only part of our bodies.
Because ultraviolet light exposure has been shown to be beneficial in so many ways, it s narrow-minded to think only of its potential effects on our skin especially when those effects cannot be attributed to moderate exposure. For more than 10 years, U.S. health authorities have pervasively and effectively advised against all sun exposure, including regular moderate exposure. Since melanoma has been shown to be inhibited by vitamin D and regular sun exposure, these advisories against regular moderate exposure can only be correctly based on solar promotion of squamous-basal skin cancers, which have a death rat of 0.3 percent and cause on 2,000 U.S. deaths yearly. Tanning Trends believes there is common ground in what medical lobbyists and the tanning industry hope to accomplish. We all want to reduce the incidence of skin cancer and permanent skin damage.