Happy Wednesday!
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1. Counselling Conundrum: a real question from a patient
2. Concise Conclusion: a straight-forward patient-friendly answer
3. Quick Wrap-up
Clearly, there are nuances that may not be captured in this format. The goal here is to provide you with helpful counselling tips which often draw from multiple sources or those which are not commonly accessed by busy healthcare providers serving the community.
Counselling Conundrum: "My friends said I don't need to use sunscreen as I have darker skin, and that it will make my sunshine vitamin low anyways. Is this true?"
Concise Conclusion: Although it is true that darker skin provides more protection against the sun, the main reason to wear sunscreen is to lower your risk of skin cancer caused by UV rays, and darker skin does not protect you adequately. As for the vitamin D (the sunshine vitamin) concerns; it does block your body from making some of it's own, but not enough to avoid sunscreens. The bottom line is it's best to wear sunscreen no matter who you are and what your vitamin D concerns are.
Quick Wrap-up: Darker skin can provide up to 13 SPF, while the recommended SPF is 30 for skin cancer prevention. Sunscreen also has not been shown to significantly reduce vitamin D levels or even BMD Z-scores (in part because patients rarely apply to 100% of body, and reapply it properly). We typically recommend SPF 30 or more regardless of SPF/skin colour, reapply every 2 hours and after sweating/swimming. Sun protection also helps prevent skin aging if your patients need more motivation!
Dive Deeper
We hope you have found this useful. Would appreciate your reply to this email with any feedback or topic suggestions you can; it will be the key to making this newsletter the best it can be.
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