Some docs still 'prescribe' tanning, despite risks

Five minutes in a bikini with her eyes closed, relaxing in the heat of a tanning bed, and Delta Payet felt her winter blues easing away. It was just as her doctor had promised.

A high school junior in frigid Vermont, Payet had been tired and unhappy for weeks when her family doctor gave her a diagnosis of seasonal affective disorder, a fall and wintertime melancholy brought on by changes in ambient light, body temperature and hormone regulation. He told her to get some sun. "But it's not like I could take a long vacation," Payet recalls. "He said that going to a tanning bed would do the trick."

She went three times a week from February right through the summer. For about the next three years, she'd pop in now and then. She didn't realize there could be long-term effects: "I loved being tan, and I thought I looked and felt healthy."

Payet, now 40, stopped going to tanning beds in her early 20s, after a dermatologist found a keratosis (an abnormal skin growth) on her right breast. She says he told her it wasn't immediately dangerous but probably had come from tanning too much. During the next 10 years, she became an aesthetician and eventually opened a skin care salon in Paradise Valley, Arizona; she didn't even think about her time in the tanning bed. But in 2001, Payet got a reminder of the worst kind, this time on her upper arm: a precancerous mole—a harbinger of melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer .

Her doctor removed it, leaving behind a 1-inch-by-1-inch scar. In subsequent visits, he removed three other precancerous moles and several more that looked suspicious. She says that because she had no family history of skin cancer, the doctor thought it was odd for her to have so many worrisome moles — unless she'd tanned a lot when she was younger.

Today Payet knows the harsh truth: Tanning is not a proven treatment for SAD — but it is a proven carcinogen. In fact, people who lie in a tanning bed increase their melanoma risk by 74 percent, a study from the University of Minnesota in Twin Cities reports. When she catches a glimpse of her scar, Payet can't help but wonder: Did following her doctor's advice, well-meaning as it was, make her susceptible to cancer?

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