What should you know about skin cancer pain?

Pain may feel tender, burning, stinging, throbbing, or shooting. A lesion can hurt when it is touched or rubbed, while deeper or spreading disease may irritate nearby tissues or nerves. Infection around an open lesion can add warmth, swelling, discharge, or worsening tenderness.

Pain is not a reliable way to identify skin cancer: some suspicious lesions are painless, and painful lesions can have non-cancerous causes. Tell the care team where the pain is, how it feels, what triggers it, and how it affects sleep, movement, eating, or washing.

Keep the area clean as advised, protect it from friction, and avoid applying unapproved creams or numbing products to an open lesion. Use prescribed medicines according to the plan and report whether relief lasts between doses.

Cancer pain management may combine medicines, wound care, treatment of infection, and treatment directed at the cancer. Palliative radiotherapy can sometimes ease pain from a troublesome area. Palliative care can support comfort and daily function at any stage of serious illness.

Contact the care team promptly if pain is new, rapidly worsening, not controlled by the prescribed plan, or accompanied by spreading redness, fever, pus, heavy bleeding, or a foul smell. Seek urgent help for severe pain with confusion, faintness, breathing difficulty, or inability to take essential medicines.

Ask what is causing the pain, which medicine or dressing is suitable, and when to take it. Ask about side effects, how to manage breakthrough pain, whether radiotherapy could help, and whether a palliative care team can support you alongside cancer treatment.