Yes. A 2015 survey commissioned by GrassrootsHealth found that 99 percent of dermatologists believe that UV is therapeutic in treating cosmetic skin conditions, 88 percent recommend UV treatment or use their own sunbeds to treat client’s cosmetic skin conditions and nearly 30 percent of dermatologists refer clients to tanning salons as an inexpensive means of self-treatment.
The dermatology community has lobbied aggressively to increase accessibility to “safe” UV treatments – procedures that often involve higher UV doses than tanning salons deliver – by legislation that would strike insurance co-pays in order to increase phototherapy usage, which is referred to as “safe.” It’s a huge contradiction that underscores the complexity of this issue.
In fact, many dermatology offices use higher-intensity sunbeds themselves to treat cosmetic and non-lethal skin conditions like psoriasis — a practice many in the dermatology industry promote as a “safe” treatment for this condition. A past president of the American Academy of Dermatology, wrote a review of high-intensity UVA phototherapy in the New England Journal of Medicine titled, “UVA1 is Often A1!” where he wrote of high-intensity UVA sunbeds, “The relative risk for the induction of cutaneous malignancies is unknown.”
Dermatology is maintaining that its usage of high-intensity UVA dermatology sunbeds (whose standard course is three sessions a week) have an “unknown” link to skin cancer. Yet AAD compares lower-intensity salon sunbeds to tobacco and arsenic?
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