Sunglasses, Skin Cancer, and Science
The Challenges of Western Medicine
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines, to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic is going to explore two topics. The first is my own experience with avoiding sunburn and the second explores why we’ll never be able to scientifically prove my method works. It’s two counterintuitive topics rolled into one essay so let’s dive into Sunglasses, Skin Cancer, and Science.
Intro
I’m of Dutch descent and I have reddish hair. While not as fair-skinned as the Irish, let’s just say that my skin is highly sensitive to exposure to ultraviolet (UV) light. So I guess you might be wondering why I moved to Tucson Arizona where we have 350 sunny days a year… Well, the short answer is that’s what you do for love… and Lisa picked this location.
Yes, 350 days of sun is quite a lot and I can already hear
from less sunny England trying to even compare but even he, and maybe especially he, can benefit from a counterintuitive lesson I learned in avoiding sunburns: Ditch the sunglasses.Background
I work in an office setting and don’t get a lot of sun throughout the day so, every once in a while, I’d lay out in the backyard and try to bolster my tan so I could prevent more serious burns when I was out rock climbing or biking or what have you. The thing is, I could only lay out for 20 minutes without burning. At 25 minutes, I’d be all but guaranteed a nice rosy color which isn’t good.
But I was wearing my sunglasses.
I wore sunglasses everywhere. All the older photos of me outside prove those glasses were always there; the darker the better and typically polarized. That was, and still is, the “common sense” thing to do to protect our eyes from UV rays. Plus the sun was just so blindingly bright how could I not wear them?
This all changed circa 2017 (I think) when I heard a podcast that, for the life of me, I can’t find again.1 I just remember a short and passing conversation about how there seemed to be a link between sunglasses and an increased risk of skin cancer due to them blinding our bodies from triggering the proper biological responses.
When the guest was pressed about why there wasn’t any scientific research on the topic, they explained the ethical quandary of any experiment. On the one hand, you were risking future skin cancer for those wearing sunglasses if you were right. On the other hand, you were risking UV damage to the eyes if you were wrong. Catch 22. It wouldn’t pass an ethics panel.
My Anecdotal Experience.
Notwithstanding the lack of hard scientific evidence, it made logical sense to me and I decided to wean myself off of sunglasses. I started when I was outside working on my property or playing with my kids in the pool and took it slow. What I noticed first, is that my eyes took a while to adjust to the brightness of reality. I had literally crippled my eyes with perpetual darkness and artificial light and they needed time to adapt.
The second thing I noticed is that quantifiably, I could be outside in the sunshine for significantly longer. That 20-minute limit I mentioned before? That was in the springtime. Now I could be in my pool, in the middle of July, with no sunscreen and no sunglasses, and not burn even past the 40-minute mark.
No burn after 40 minutes… not even pink and I’d never been more tan in my life!
Out of curiosity, I tried an experiment and played in the pool with sunglasses. I intentionally cut it short at 30 minutes and still earned myself a pretty solid sunburn. Clearly, there was something to the hypothesis. I’ve gone on and experimented with it more over the years and can confirm, at least anecdotally for myself, that it works.
Blinding Our Bodies
I wish I had better sources or more hard-core science on this topic but the generally accepted, and safe stance online is that sunglasses are good because they protect our eyes from dangerous UV. Any risk of sunburns can be mitigated by increasingly high SPF sunscreens. Mainstream advice is to block our bodies from the sun and that’s that. It’s nice and simple but Dr. Sharon Moalem who wrote Survival of the Sickest suggests:
The largest organ of a human body is a skin. It is because it is responsible for important functions related to immune system, the nervous system, the circulatory system and metabolism. It is a crucial step in the manufacturing of Vitamin D.
Skin colour is determined by the amount and type of melanin, a specialised pigment that absorbs light, produced by our body.
As we all know, skin colour changes, to some an extent , in response to sun exposure. The trigger for that response is the pituitary gland. In natural conditions, almost as soon as we are exposed to the sun, our pituitary gland hormones that act as booster for many melanocytes (cell that manufacturers melanin) and our melanocytes start producing melanin on overdrive. Unfortunately, it's very easy to disrupt that process. The pituitary gland gets its information from the optic nerve-when the optic nerve senses sunlight, it signals the pituitary gland to kick start the melanocytes.
What happen in this case that much less sunlight reaches the optic nerve, much less warning is sent to the pituitary gland , much less melanocytes-stimulating harmone is released, much less melanin is produced- and much more sunburn results.
This quickly spawned a firestorm of controversy because the safe response was to protect the skin and eyes. The approach I’m suggesting requires us to trust the antifragile nature of our body and expose it to what many consider harmful.
So, we find ourselves in a quandary. It would be nice if the scientific and medical experts could help answer it and this brings us to our second counterintuitive insight of this essay: Science is atomized when our bodies are holistic, multi-variate biological systems.
Think about it, our doctors all specialize in very narrow areas. As found in What’s in a Brain? regarding the gut and brain connection referred to as psychobiotics, there’s a gastroenterologist for the gut, an endocrinologist for hormones the gut stimulates, a neurologist for the brain mechanics, and a psychologist for the behavioral manifestations with a few others I cut out for simplicity sake. We don’t actually understand our gut-to-brain connection at all, even today.
Now let’s compare the eye-to-skin relationship. Did you know that there are two different doctors for eyes? Optometrists examine, diagnose, and treat patients' eyes while Ophthalmologists perform medical and surgical treatments for eye conditions. Then we add in the obvious dermatologist for the skin but don’t forget to bring back that endocrinologist and neurologist as well!
This results in our medical science being hobbled by two major problems:
Doctors specialize in narrowly focused disciplines and don’t step out of line.
Research ethics don’t like experiments that could hurt either of the two test cases.
It’s a polymathic problem in a world of hyperspecialization so almost no cross-disciplinary research exists on this topic, let alone in the hallmark of a randomized, double-blind trial with control… if that were even possible.2
Adding Injury to Injury
Sunglasses, protecting our eyes from UV, are likely blinding our bodies to the actual levels of UV and increasing our risk of skin cancer. But wait, there’s more!
It’s also blinding our endocrine system which not only releases melanin to protect the skin, but also kicks off the production of vitamin D. This essential vitamin is crucial for immune system health and tests of COVID patients typically showed they were vitamin D deficient.
Moreover, bright sunshine triggers the production of serotonin which is associated with boosting mood and helping us feel calm and focused. Healthy sun exposure is then contrasted with the darker nighttime lighting triggering the brain to make melatonin, a natural and essential sleep aid.
Sunglasses blind our bodies to this sunshine through the most sensitive photoreceptors in our body; our eyes. The cascading consequences have only been given a cursory introduction here but affect both physical and mental health.
Back to the challenge of rigorous scientific research on this topic. There’s just no way to reduce this highly complex system into simply focused research that can control for all of these variables. Ethically there are restrictions, professionally it crosses almost a dozen disciplines, and scientifically it’s too multi-variate. It’s what we call a wicked problem in systems thinking and it requires a polymathic, cross-disciplinary approach to solve.
Summary
As I mentioned before, I’d love to be able to provide better proof than anecdotes and sources to professionals that many might discount as fringe. I will however, stand by my own anecdotes and add that my wife, my cousin, and a few friends who have also followed this counterintuitive finding also report that they are less prone to sunburn, feel better, and find that they don’t care to wear sunglasses much at all anymore.
It’s been 7 years for me and where I used to burn to the point of my skin peeling at least once or twice a year, I haven’t had a burn that peeled that entire time. It’s also a period of time where I’ve significantly reduced my use of sunscreen unless I know I’ll be unprotected for over an hour. (There are a lot of consequences for sunscreen too.)
I can’t prove it scientifically and science has barriers that prevent proving it. It’s a perfect example of how our compartmentalized, specialized, and myopic scientific endeavor breaks apart our holistic, integrated, dynamic, and complex bodies into bits and pieces while missing the very real and negative consequences. We simply must look at these systems from a different perspective and continually learn, unlearn, and relearn.
In closing, here’s a longer investigation into the issue with sunglasses:
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I think it was Joe Rogan but I can’t find it.
It’s a lot like acupuncture. We know the body is an electrical system, we know nerves are interconnected from our feet to our heads, and we know that these nerves can behave like circuits and ‘short’, causing pain and inflammation. We also have thousands of years of Eastern Medicine that supports the theory yet we can’t PROVE that acupuncture works.
being a jazz fan I only wear sunglasses in night clubs
I am relatively fair skinned and have spent my entire life in West Texas (lots of sunshine) farming and then later setting on a truck, but still in and out of the sun constantly. Throughout my life, I've had dozens of severe sunburns. I got wiser as I got older and started using sunscreen, but not diligently. But I have rarely worn sunglasses. If I knew I was going to be out in the sun at the swimming pool or the lake, I might wear some for a few hours. Since the age of 50, I've regularly gone to a dermatologist. About seven years ago, a melanoma on my forehead showed up. That was quickly removed and I have yet to have another appear, although I am constantly on the lookout for one. I am now approaching 68 years. I would venture to say, then, that for me, your thesis is correct, even if I have had one melanoma removed.