Covered with tattoos? Get critical illness insurance

Covered with tattoos? Get critical illness insurance

Nowadays, tattoos have become very popular and turned from a “trademark” of sailors and tough guys to body art and form of personal expression.

Tattoo medical issues

Tattoos can be safely acquired, as long as the tattooist follows proper precautions: working with disposal items and sterilizing their equipment after each use. Because tattooing requires breaking the skin barrier, it may carry health risks, including infection and allergic reactions. Many jurisdictions require that tattooists have blood-borne pathogen training. A blood-borne disease is one that can be spread through contamination by blood and other body fluids. The most common examples are HIV, hepatitis B, hepatitis C and viral hemorrhagic fevers.

Tattoo ink may cause cancer

The wide range of pigments currently used in tattoo inks may create unforeseen health problems. Dermatologists have observed rare but severe medical complications from tattoo pigments in the body, and have noted that people acquiring tattoos rarely assess health risks prior to receiving their tattoos.

Tattoos, actually, some pigments used in tattooing, could be a burden on lymphatic system. They can migrate from a tattoo site to lymph nodes, where large particles may accumulate and cause inflammation. Smaller particles are small enough to be carried away by the lymphatic system.

New study says that nanoparticles from tattoo inks travel inside the body. They can accumulate in lymph nodes and may cause cancer. Tattoo ink is generally permanent because it has been made not to fade over time. Some tattoo artists use their own recipes by mixing dry pigment and a carrier. Tattoo inks may be made from pen ink, soot, dirt, blood, or other imaginable and unimaginable ingredients. No matter whether the ink is “homemade” or “professional”, you use it at your own risk.

Tattoos can mask a melanoma

Experts say that tats can actually pose a bit of an increased risk when it comes to skin cancer. “The key point is that it’s harder to do the surveillance on moles that are covered by tattoos,” says a “star” dermatologist Dr. Hooman Khorasani, director of the skin cancer institute at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital.

Melanoma is less common than other skin cancers. However, it is much more dangerous if it is not found in the early stages. Tattoos can mask a melanoma, making it difficult to track changes in an existing mole or spot a new one as it forms. It’s obvious: a man cannot observe a tattoo on his back easily. Dermatologists have seen melanomas on old tattoos, especially on those parts of a human body where you have to use a mirror to take a look at. Most melanomas, if found early, are curable. But any delay in diagnosis and excision of the cancer increases the risk treatment will not succeed.

Melanoma is a malignant tumor of the melanocyte cells of the skin. Melanocytes produce the dark pigment, melanin, which is responsible for the color of skin. These cells predominantly occur in skin, but are also found in other parts of the body, including the bowel and the eye. Melanoma can originate in any part of the body that contains melanocytes. It is the deadliest form of skin cancer, and is in fact one of the worst forms of the disease period, one of the most deadly kinds of cancer.

According to the World Health Organization’s statistics, doctors diagnose about 160,000 new cases of melanoma and about 48,000 melanoma-related deaths worldwide yearly.

Tattoo removal costs more money and pain

There are costs and pain associated with applying tattoos, but the costs and pain associated with removing them are greater. Permanent tattoos can last lifetime however, sometimes it is possible to remove them, fully or partially, by laser removal treatment.

Permanent makeup

Today, tattooing is often used as a cosmetic technique for permanent makeup: to enhance eyebrows, lips, and eyelids, to hide or neutralize skin discolorations, to disguise scars and white spots in the skin such as in vitiligo.

Tattooing used as permanent makeup gives immediate and long lasting results, which could imitate topically applied cosmetics or can be quite unnoticeable. Cosmetic tattooing salons are generally regulated by local health authorities for skin penetration procedures, which is a separate category from general beauty services.

As with tattoos, permanent makeup may have complications, such as allergies to the pigments, formation of scars, granulomas and keloids, skin cracking, peeling, blistering and local infection. It is essential that tattooists use appropriate personal protective equipment to prevent the transmission of blood borne pathogens.

Permanent makeup dates back at least to the start of the 20th century, though its nature was often concealed in its early days. The tattooist George Burchett, a major developer of the technique when it became fashionable in the 1930s, described in his memoirs how beauty salons tattooed many women without their knowledge, offering it as a “complexion treatment … of injecting vegetable dyes under the top layer of the skin.”

Critical illness insurance

If your body is covered with tattoos, getting critical illness insurance is a good idea. Just in case. Typically, it offers a lump sum cash payment if the policyholder is diagnosed with one of the critical illnesses listed in the insurance policy.