The importance of a full clinical examination: assessment of index lesions referred to a skin cancer clinic without a total body skin examination would miss one in three melanomas.

Traditional clinical teaching emphasises the importance of a full clinical examination. In the clinical assessment of lesions that may be skin cancer, full examination allows detection of incidental lesions, as well as helping in the characterisation of the index lesion. Despite this, a total body skin examination is not always performed.

Are subjective accounts of itch to be relied on? The lack of relation between visual analogue itch scores and actigraphic measures of scratch.

There is a widespread belief that subjective accounts of disease are key components of measures of disease severity and quality of life. In the present study we have set out to test this hypothesis using visual analogue scales (VAS) for itch, as a subjective measure, and actigraphy as an objective measure. One-hundred and seventeen itchy children and adults (and 25 controls) were studied for clusters of nights (total number 1,654) and actigraphy scores and VAS itch taken daily.

How robust are the Dermatology Life Quality Index and other self-reported subjective symptom scores when exposed to a range of experimental biases?

Subjective-symptom tools used in dermatology have rarely been experimentally tested for cognitive "focus" and "framing" biases. We investigated the effects of affective biases on the Dermatology Life Quality Index (DLQI), the Global Health Question and visual analogue scores. Two experiments tested the response to affect-eliciting words and film.