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Do I need Mohs surgery even if my biopsy site healed well?

I get asked this almost every week. “But my biopsy site has healed so well. I put……(fill in the blank-emu oil, vitamin E etc) on it and you can hardly see it!

Yes, it is true that sometimes a biopsy will remove the entire lesion if it is very small. However, just as you might get a breast biopsy or prostate biopsy, if you had cancer diagnosed, you would not consider the biopsy to be a treatment.

A biopsy is simply a test, a sampling. Cancer is microscopic and can be one to several cells thick. While this watch and wait approach would be ok on very tiny basal cell cancers on the back, I would not do this on the face or any tumors such as squamous cell carcinoma that have the potential to metastasize.

Tags: Basal cell carcinoma, melanoma, mohs surgery los angeles, mohs surgery pasadena, mohs surgery santa monica, mohs surgery valley, skin biopsy, skin cancer los angeles, skin cancer surgery, squamous cell carcinoma

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2012 at 2:58 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.