Get Your Skin Checked, and Stop Letting the GP Talk You Out of It

There’s a post doing the rounds on r/australia this morning, a young woman sharing a photo of her leg from a few years back, the scar left after they cut a melanoma in situ out of what had looked like an innocent freckle. She posts this every year, apparently, as a PSA. Get your skin checked. Don’t assume you’re too young. Don’t assume the mole is fine because it looks fine.

It’s the kind of post that shouldn’t need repeating, and yet here we are, repeating it.

What got me wasn’t the post itself, it was the comments underneath. Story after story of people in their twenties and thirties turning up to a GP asking for a skin check and being met with a raised eyebrow. “Why are you here?” “You don’t have the skin for skin cancer.” One bloke’s doctor apparently just looked confused that he’d bothered coming in at all, no family history, nothing suspicious, just wanted a check-up. Found two basal cell carcinomas. A woman was told at 25 she was “too young” to worry about it. Another watched her late wife have to specifically request a biopsy because the doctor wouldn’t have bothered otherwise. It turned out to be melanoma, and she died from it two years later.

I’m 51 now, and I grew up in an era when “slip slop slap” was a jingle you heard on Saturday morning cricket broadcasts, wedged between ads for Vegemite and the local hardware store. It worked, in the sense that everyone my age can still recite it. Whether it actually changed our behaviour at the time is a different question. I spent a fair chunk of my childhood in Rosebud over the summer holidays, red-shouldered and peeling by Boxing Day, the way half of Melbourne seemed to be back then. Nobody thought much of it. Sunburn was just something that happened to you, like a stubbed toe. You didn’t go to the doctor about a stubbed toe either.

I get my skin checked now, every twelve months, at a clinic that does nothing else. I started because a mate at work, a guy who spent twenty years doing outdoor IT installs before he moved to a desk job like the rest of us, had a melanoma cut off his back that he’d had no idea was even growing. He only found it because his wife spotted it while he was getting changed. He’s fine, they got it early, but it rattled him enough that he told everyone in the office to go get checked. So I did. Turned out I had nothing, which was a relief, but also slightly annoying given the effort of getting undressed in a cold room for a stranger with a magnifying light. Small price.

What strikes me reading through that thread is the gap between the official messaging, which has been consistent and pretty good for decades now, and what actually happens in the room when you ask a GP for something outside the standard fifteen-minute appointment template. A skin check isn’t a Medicare item that maps neatly onto “patient presents with symptom X.” It’s preventative, it takes time, and if there’s nothing obviously wrong, some doctors seem to treat the request itself as slightly odd. That’s not a moral failing on their part necessarily, it’s a system that rewards seeing more patients for shorter visits, and prevention doesn’t fit that shape well. But it does mean the people who most need the check, the ones who assume everything’s fine because nobody’s told them otherwise, are exactly the ones most likely to get waved off.

Australia has one of the highest melanoma rates in the world. We know why: thin ozone layer over the Southern Hemisphere, a culture that genuinely does spend more time outdoors than most, and generations of us who grew up before sunscreen was something you actually used rather than something your mum yelled at you about once before you snuck out the back door anyway. None of that is news. What’s less discussed is that the follow-through, the bit where you actually go and sit in front of someone qualified and get looked at properly, still depends heavily on you being pushy enough to insist, or lucky enough to land a doctor who takes it seriously without being asked twice.

I don’t have a tidy fix for that. More bulk-billed dermatology clinics would help. So would GPs being given the time and incentive to treat a skin check as a legitimate use of an appointment rather than an inconvenience. But in the meantime, the practical advice is the boring, unglamorous kind: if a GP brushes you off, find another one. If something on your skin has changed, don’t wait for someone to tell you it’s fine. Go and make them prove it.