From Cancer To Commitment:Baseball Great Johnny Bench Promotes Skin Cancer Awareness

Hall of Fame baseball legend Johnny Bench,64,who was the Cincinnati Reds' star catcher in the 1970s,is promoting skin cancer awareness for Major League Baseball's Play Sun Smart campaign.Bench has quite a bit of personal experience with the topic,as he himself was recently diagnosed  with,and successfully treated for,basal cell carcinoma,the most common form of skin cancer.It was found on his lower eyelids.
The problem with skin cancer is,you can easily overlook it,just dismissing those small lesions on your face or elsewhere on your body.It often takes a dermatologist to determine just what those bumps,moles or rough patches really are.They could be malignant or precancerous,even though they may not look particularly menacing to the naked eye.At his doctor's suggestion,Johnny Bench had those little bumps on his lower eyelids biopsied by a specialist.When they turned out to be basal cell carcinomas,he underwent highly sophisticated surgery called Mohs surgery,in which the surgeon basically slices off minute layers of skin cells,checking each layer under a microscope until there are no more cancerous cells left.This preserves more of the surrounding healthy tissue.
Bench fully recovered from his January operation,but he wants to make sure others don't have to go through the ordeal of skin cancer.He committed himself to the MLB skin cancer awareness program,becoming its 2012 spokesman and appearing in a Play Sun Smart video with Harlem youths.Play Sun Smart is a joint educational project of Major League Baseball;the Major League Baseball Players' Association;and the American Academy of Dermatology.
Skin cancer is linked to cumulative exposure to the sun's ultraviolet rays.It is estimated that 20% of Americans will develop skin cancer in their lifetimes.Organizations such as the American Academy of Dermatology and MLB are trying hard to get the word out about this potentially deadly disease.Besides basal cell carcinoma,the other,less common forms of skin cancer are squamous cell carcinoma and melanoma,the  rarest and most dangerous form.