Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Tests and diagnosis
By Mayo Clinic staffSee your doctor if you notice a new skin growth, a bothersome change in your skin, a change in the appearance or texture of a mole, or a sore that doesn't heal in two weeks. Your doctor may suspect cancer by simply looking at your skin. But to properly diagnose skin cancer, your doctor or dermatologist will need to take a small sample of your skin (biopsy) for analysis in a lab. A biopsy can usually be done in a doctor's office using a local anesthetic.
Skin cancer is generally divided into two stages:
- Local. In this stage, cancer affects only the skin.
- Metastatic. At this point, cancer has spread beyond the skin.
Because superficial skin cancers such as basal or squamous cell carcinoma rarely spread, a biopsy often is the only test needed to determine the cancer stage. But if you have a large growth or one that's existed for some time, your doctor may do further tests to determine the extent of the cancer.
