How to Diagnose Skin Cancer

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Dr. Susan Jewell, on behalf of Expert Village I'm going to talk to you about skin cancer, signs of skin cancer. Now, in this clip, we're going to talk about diagnosis. How do we diagnose skin cancer? We'll there are four techniques that the doctor can do. A lot of them you can do it at the clinic itself, in the clinic office itself. They are punch biopsy, an incisional biopsy, an excisional biopsy and a shave biopsy. Now, the difference between the four is this. In a punch biopsy the doctor takes a sharp tool and he removes a circle of tissue from the lesion itself and then sends that to pathology. In the incisional biopsy, the doctor uses a scalpel and he removes part of the lesion and he sends that specimen to the pathology. The excisional biopsy, in here the doctor removes the whole lesion including a margin of normal skin usually 3 or 4 mm of normal skin that surrounds the lesion itself and sends that whole specimen to the pathology. And the last way to diagnose skin cancer lesion is a shave biopsy when the doctor use a sharp blade and he literally shaves off the whole lesion of the surface of the skin and sends that specimen to the pathology to diagnose. So, these are the different ways that you can diagnose skin cancer."