No. In the United States, tobacco use is responsible for nearly 1 in 5 deaths; this equals about 480,000 early deaths each year. That number is approximately 37 times greater than the total number of skin cancer deaths in the United States annually (12,980) – the overwhelming majority of which occur in men over age 50 who never used a sunbed.
Female smokers are 25.7 times (a 2,570% increase) more likely to develop lung cancer than women who never smoked. Male smokers are 25 times (a 2,500% increase) more likely to develop lung cancer than men who never smoked. (US Surgeon General Report 2014). In contrast, the World Health Organization (WHO) says those who reported in surveys ever using a sunbed increased their risk of melanoma by a factor of 0.15 times (15%), which is 166-170 times less of a relative increase than the number of lung cancers attributed by the Surgeon General to smoking. Additionally, WHO qualified its estimates with a very important caveat: “Epidemiologic studies to date give no consistent evidence that use of indoor tanning facilities in general is associated with the development of melanoma skin cancer.”
The purveyors of this reckless comparison base their misstatement solely on one paper – a discredited meta-analysis of self-administered survey data. The paper in question attempts to extrapolate that the number of people who said they “ever had” one sunbed session on self-administered surveys — without reliably confirming or accounting for that or other sun behavior or genetic factors — can be used to project how many people will get skin cancer based on the author’s own creation of a daisy-chained projection based on no real collection of reliable information.
Example: The United States and Northern and Western Europe have substantially similar mortality rates for Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC), Squamous Cell Carcinoma (SCC) and Melanoma skin cancers—all numbers that are counted in registries. But the non-registry-related estimate calculations for SCC and BCC are 30.7 and 18.4, respectively, times greater in the United States than for a similar population in Europe. Given similar mortality rates in the two regions for the same cancers, it is clear that the disproportionately higher incidence rate in the U.S. results from the reporting of non-cancerous lesions removed by medical procedures in the U.S., often under the pretense of being “pre-cancerous.” Such lesions generally are not removed nor reported in European countries, with no effect on mortality.
If it’s true that tanning is similar to tobacco, how could a dermatologist ever justify treating a patient with UV light or referring a patient to a tanning salon (as many do) for the treatment of cosmetic skin conditions? That would be like telling a patient to SMOKE A CIGARETTE to treat psoriasis.
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