The Gene That Wouldn’t Let Us Sleep
Imagine one of your ancestors walking across the African savannah. The grass moves. There are two possibilities. It is the wind. Or maybe it is a lion. The relaxed hominin thinks: Probably the wind. The anxious hominid stops. The heart rate rises. Pupils dilate. Blood is redirected towards muscles. The brain begins calculating escape routes. […]
Running and Longevity: The Wisdom of the Second Half
I say this to reassure many patients who ask me about bringing their children for skin cancer checks. In general, we lose our beauty, or develop cancers, after our reproductive peak. Evolution is all about survival of the species. This is why cancer is extremely rare in the very young. Life is an endurance […]
Thoughts While Running a Marathon in Antarctica
In an island on Antarctica, a single icy, gravelly path bends to follow the Antarctic research stations of Chile, Russia and China. Runners—if you include my ambling while wearing multiple layers of woollens to go with waterproof pants, socks, balaclavas and multi-layered gloves—have to traverse the hilly terrain that bends towards the penguins lining the […]
The Dermatology of Chocolates
Getting under the skin of Whittaker’s, Lindt, and confectionary A few years ago, I developed the concept of “biodynamic excisional skin tension lines” (BEST lines) essentially to understand skin tension, and to figure out the best way to excise skin cancer and obtain the best results. These BEST lines are now considered the “first major […]
An orange a day may make your doctor go away.
As a skin cancer expert, and someone with an interest in evolutionary biology, I am often asked to operate on animals or treat skin diseases on amazing creatures. The picture to the left shows me examining a lemur (it had a tumour on its tail). Lemurs—precursors of modern primates—can produce their own vitamin C. In […]
How effective are the medicines we take?
Understanding drug responses is key for both doctors and patients I have often been quoted as saying, “One cannot have bad skin and good health.” Skin merely reflects what lies beneath. I was born in England, and my parents went to India to work in medical mission hospitals, and I studied medicine (and later surgery) […]
Why buying a Swiss Chalet might be a bad idea!
Looking back in time brings back mixed feelings: Should we have bought that house? Sold the piano nobody played? What about the lives of our great-great grandparents devoid of modern luxuries? We can treasure moments in time, balance the baggage of our past against our dreams for the future, but we cannot escape time itself. […]