Health care organizations holding free skin cancer screening
Contact: Sarah Bello
CMH partnering with OHSU and Silver Falls Dermatology
ASTORIA, Ore. — CMH, OHSU and Silver Falls Dermatology will be holding a free SPOTme® skin cancer screening on Saturday, September 17, from noon to 3 p.m., at the CMH-OHSU Health Medical Group Clinic in Seaside (1111 N. Roosevelt Dr., Ste. 210).
Sancy Leachman, MD, PhD, chair of the OHSU Department of Dermatology in Portland, and Marina Dolmatova, DNP, FNP-C, nurse practitioner at Silver Falls Dermatology in Astoria, will be providing the screenings for patients.
“You can easily see disease, and that’s one of the things that makes this melanoma campaign that we’re doing so vital,” Leachman says. “It’s one of these things where you can actually stop the disease by catching it early, and all you have to do is look with your own eyes.”
Leachman was featured in a radio interview about the event with local host Tom Freel on KAST in August. You can listen to it at columbiamemorial.org/news.
There are just a couple of appointments still available for the screening. Register at columbiamemorial.org/spotme. No walk-ins will be taken the day of the event. Anyone interested in future screenings should watch CMH’s online calendar of events at columbiamemorial.org/events.
“Go home today and take a good look at your skin — really, really look,” Dr. Leachman says. “And if you see something, reach out to a health care provider quickly. Don’t just let it go. Find out if it needs to be removed. And get the people that you love to do the same thing.
“When we do screenings like the one that we’re going to be doing, we usually identify at least 1-2 melanomas and 4-5 other skin cancers for every 50-100 people we see. So, what that means is that you know someone right now that has a melanoma, you just don’t know who they are. By encouraging them to look at their skin, you really could save the life of somebody you really care about.”
The SPOTme® skin cancer screening program is part of the American Academy of Dermatology’s SPOT Skin Cancer™ initiative, a campaign to create a world without skin cancer through public awareness, community outreach programs and services, and advocacy that promote the prevention, detection and care of skin cancer.
Since 1985, AAD member dermatologists have conducted more than 2.4 million free skin cancer screenings and have detected nearly 248,000 suspicious lesions, including more than 27,500 suspected melanomas.
For more information about how to prevent and detect skin cancer, including instructions on how to perform a skin self-exam, visit SPOTme.org. There, you can download a body mole map for tracking changes in your skin and find free SPOTme® skin cancer screenings in your area.