A Stitch in Haste

An update to my earlier post on sunblock hysteria, courtesy of Spiked:

Michael Holick, professor of medicine and physiology at Boston University School of Medicine, is still sore about being asked to resign his professorship of dermatology in May 2004. His crime? He wrote a book called The UV Advantage, which suggests that exposing yourself to sunlight without sunblock for five or 10 minutes a day can be a good thing, providing us with Vitamin D and helping to strengthen our bones and protect against illnesses like type II diabetes and multiple sclerosis. 'It was the "without sunblock" bit that they didn't like', he says. 'Apparently it's forbidden to tell people to go out without sunblock.'
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Holick offended against a contemporary religion, one which says that sunlight causes skin cancer, that tanning is the irresponsible act of reckless individuals...
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He was called in by Barbara Gilchrist, chair of the Department of Dermatology at Boston University School of Medicine, and told that 'your thinking is not in line with ours'. Holick groans that the sunscreen industry is 'a major funder of the dermatology community in the US, especially the American Academy of Dermatology….' 'So I was asked to resign from the department', he says, though he remains at Boston as a professor of medicine and physiology.

One parting thought of things perhaps to come:

One London expert has suggested that parents who allow their children to get sunburned should be prosecuted for neglect.

We're already seeing such proposals for parents who smoke and parents of obese children...so why not add a day at the beach to the list of parental violations?  Right up there with too much television or video games, too many movies, too much time at the mall, too much allowance, too little allowance, hazardous chores (think lawn mowers), and too few vacations in Orlando.