Promoting Sun Awareness and Skin Cancer Prevention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, preventive medicine has become an important focus in medicine. For physicians, practicing preventive medicine must include patient education. One of many areas where patients and physicians can work together to improve health is the area of skin cancer prevention. Both nonmelanoma and melanoma skin cancers have now been clearly linked to sun exposure and UV radiation,1 and regular use of sunscreen has been shown to reduce the risk of skin cancer.2 Skin cancer may therefore be preventable through sun protection and early detection, and this is a message medical students should learn to promote to future patients. To this end, a sun-awareness curriculum was developed four years ago at the University of Western Ontario. The one-week curriculum includes a case presentation on melanoma, lectures and small-group discussions on skin lesions and skin cancer, and discussion of social attitudes about tanning. At the conclusion of the curriculum, medical students present a one-hour interactive slide show on sun protection to fourth-grade classrooms throughout London, Ontario. In 1998 a study was conducted to assess the immediate affects of the new sun-awareness curriculum on the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of students in the class of 2001. The results showed dramatic increases in students' knowledge, a change in their attitudes toward tanning, and the intention to adopt healthier sun-protection behavior.3 In 1999 we followed up with the same medical school class to seek what changes had been maintained over the year. We found a decrease in their knowledge of a few important topics, such as the ABCDs of melanoma (an important tool for melanoma detection), which suggest that these topics should be revisited periodically. However, on the positive side, the students had maintained the change in their attitudes toward tanning, and many reported having changed their own sun-protection habits, including increased use of sun protection, the use of higher-SPF sunscreens, and decreased use of tanning salons. These behavioral changes resulted in a 50% reduction in the number of sunburns reported by the students. A sun-awareness curriculum such as the one developed at the University of Western Ontario can have a lasting impact on medical students' knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Our goal is that these changes will enable students to effectively promote skin cancer prevention with their future patients.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".