Stream 2 Skin Cancer and Tumours - Benign skin tumours

 Topics to be covered in the Certificate Course.

Recognise variants of Seborrhoeic keratoses
 Mucosal freckles
 Simple freckles
 Worrying freckles
 Moles or Nevi

Benign Skin Tumours

Unfortunately if you are not taught  about benign skin tumours you will think that everything you see is a basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma or melanoma.  The vast majority of things that grow on the skin as you get older are in fact benign.

Let me start with benign moles.  They can be flat ,raised or sunken and almost any colour you like from skin colour through black.  The technical names are junctional for the flat ones, compound for the slightly raised ones and dermal which can range between very raised to very sunken.  The first three images below illustrate these.

Q 1: What type of common nevus commonly has hair growing out of it?

A 1: The dermal nevus. These tend to increase in number with age and become protuberant especially on the face.

History: When you look at an elderly back and it is covered with brown slightly scaly, crumbly lesions, then you are looking at multiple seborrhoeic keratoses. They also can vary in colour from light brown all the way to jet black. They are totally benign but can commonly be mistaken for melanomas and patients invariably call them moles.

When you get the wrong side of 50 especially if you are obese, you start to grow things under your armpits and in the groin. These lesions are called skin tags. They are usually pink in colour and have a very fine connection to the skin. The medical name is acrochordon. You just snip them off with a pair of scissors. The local anaesthetic is optional depending on how you feel about the patient.