LDS skin cancer and cosmetic medicine

21/09/2026

Five questions I want every patient to ask me. Not because I need the test. Because the answers are the consultation.
Save it, bring it in, and ask. If a question makes me uncomfortable, that is information too.

21/09/2026

16/09/2026

The ABCDE rule has probably saved more lives than any other piece of public advice about skin. Keep using it.
Just know what it can miss. Nodular melanoma often breaks every letter: small, evenly shaped, a single colour, and fast. For those, the better checklist is EFG. Elevated, firm, growing. And alongside both rules,
the oldest signal there is: the spot that doesn’t match its neighbours.
None of this is meant to make you anxious. It’s meant to make you accurate. Rules are how you notice. A
skin check is how you know.
m
Send this to someone who checks their moles in the mirror once a year.

15/09/2026

The most heavily researched part of any procedure is usually the part that varies least.
What genuinely shapes an outcome sits with the person: how the plan was decided, how well anatomy and
its variation are understood, the precision of plane and depth, what has been prepared for the unexpected,
and how easy it is to be seen afterwards. Experience with anatomical variation in particular is built over
years, including in dissection, and it’s the part no one can see from a website.
None of this is meant as a warning. It’s a map. These are calm, fair questions, and any practitioner who
takes their work seriously will be glad you asked them. That includes here.

11/09/2026

Ten days left to register.
On 12 October I teach my final cadaver dissection workshop of 2026, at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons in Melbourne.

A full day at the table. Facial layers, vascular pathways, danger zones, the anatomy behind every decision I make in the room. Built for doctors who want to understand before they act.

Registrations close 20 September. Places are limited. Details and registration at ldscosmetics.com/events, link in bio.

07/09/2026

Every year brings a look that everyone suddenly wants. Some of them age well. Many don’t.

None of them were designed for your face.

An indication is different. It comes from your anatomy, your history, and what will still make sense in ten years. Trends move fast precisely because they don’t carry that weight.

I don’t treat trends. I treat faces. The difference is the plan.

Why before what.

Save it for the next time the feed tells you what your face needs.

05/09/2026

Some heroes drive utes, burn the barbecue and tell the same joke every year.

To the dads who show up quietly. Who fix things before anyone notices they were broken. Who taught us more by example than by words.

Today is for you.

Happy Father’s Day from all of us at LDS.

27/08/2026

Skin heals in stages, and the visible one ends first.

Inflammation is the alarm and the arrival of the repair. The rebuild that follows is fast and provisional.

The body closes first, and perfects later. Then comes the stage nobody sees: months of quiet remodelling, where temporary collagen is replaced with the organised kind that actually holds.

That’s why “it looks fine now” and “it has finished healing” are two different sentences. The surface reports early. The structure reports late.

Nothing about that timeline can be hurried by wanting it more.

Biology takes the time it takes.
Your skin isn’t slow. It’s thorough.

Save this for the next time your skin looks fine at week three.

24/08/2026

The hardest part of this job isn’t the clinical work. It’s the conversation where I tell someone that what they came in asking for isn’t what I’m going to recommend.

Patients arrive informed now. That’s a good thing. But information collected from other people’s faces doesn’t transfer. Different anatomy, different history, different starting point.

My job isn’t to confirm the plan you arrived with. It’s to give you an opinion you couldn’t have formed on your own. Sometimes the two match. Sometimes they don’t.

When they don’t, you’ll hear it from me directly, with the reason attached. The no is part of the care.

21/08/2026

I get asked what kind of doctor I am. The honest answer is the kind that doesn’t fit one label.

General practice. Skin cancer medicine. Cosmetic medicine. Different rooms, same job.

Because the job was never the procedure. Medicine trains you to read the whole person first. History, skin,
structure, what matters and what doesn’t. Then decide. That order doesn’t change because the question
became cosmetic.

It’s why the first thing that happens here is an assessment, not a menu. And why sometimes the answer is a plan, and sometimes the answer is no.

If you’ve ever left an appointment with the question you actually wanted to ask, that question is the appointment.


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