The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer

Between 2015 and 2021, Americans diagnosed with invasive[0] melanoma had a 94.7% net 5-year survival rate[1]. That means, if all other causes of death were impossible, an estimated 5.3% of those patients would have died of melanoma.

That's a pretty good net survival rate [3], but it's not perfect. And it's possible that less care in avoiding excessive sun exposure could lead to any cancers being more aggressive. However, I don't have a reference for that musing, so feel free to ignore it.

[0]: Invasive means the tumor has left the tissue it started in.

[1]: https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/melan.html

[2]: It would be higher if the official method for calculating net survival didn't, in my opinion, needlessly bias itself against cancer patient survival. The last time I reviewed the methodology notes, they compared daily hazards of death between cancer patients and everyone else. But, if the cancer patients had a lower hazard for a day, the difference was treated as zero instead of negative. This is a hill I'll die on, because their method pretends any confounding variables not in the model have no effect. Patients who catch melanoma early are probably less likely to die soon compared to those of similar age, race, sex, and location. An early diagnosis likely means they care enough about their health to visit doctors regularly and make good use of those visits.