Last week I went to the dermatologist. I have a few moles, and some of them were looking a little funny. The dermatologist did a full skin exam, and agreed that some of my moles looked funny, and she removed them. About a week later a pathology report confirmed that I have dysplastic nevi, and not melanoma. Yay! Sort of. The literature isn’t entirely clear what to make of patients with small numbers of dysplastic nevi—are they at increased risk of melanoma? What is the proper follow up interval? Dermatologists keep a close eye on these buggers, so I’ll be visiting her again in the fall.

But I was curious what would happen if I weren’t a doctor but simply a “regular patient” armed only with google. I was not pleased with the result of my little experiment.

Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…