Melinda Sacks receives a skin cancer screening from Morgan Rabach, MD, Clinical Instructor, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
When Melinda Sacks joined hundreds of other attendees at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival, in Aspen, Colorado, to receive a complimentary skin cancer screening by dermatologists at the Mount Sinai Health System, the clinician told her she had a suspicious spot on her face that should be checked by a specialist as soon as she returned home to Stanford, California.
Ms. Sacks says she was surprised by this because “I thought it was a birth mark.” But the small pigmented spot with a clearly defined edge was a lentigo maligna—an early form of melanoma, in which the malignant cells are confined to the tissue of origin. By catching the disease at an early stage, Ms. Sacks was able to have it removed without further complications.
This year, Ms. Sacks returned to the Aspen Ideas Festival—a 10-day public gathering dedicated to the global exchange of ideas—and thanked the team of dermatologists from Mount Sinai’s Kimberly and Eric J. Waldman Department of Dermatology, who provided free skin cancer screenings for the fourth consecutive year. The department this year screened 745 attendees and identified 6 possible melanomas, along with 40 potential basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas. Since 2013, Mount Sinai’s dermatologists have performed a total of 2,591 screenings at the festival, and identified 36 possible cases of melanoma, as well as 196 potential basal cell and squamous cell abnormalities.
“I am grateful to Mount Sinai for finding something that could have been really devastating to me,” Ms. Sacks says. “My experience was really scary and changed the way I wear sunscreen.”