ETSU Community Health Professor Dr. Joel Hillhouse featured on CBS Sunday Morning
ETSU Community Health Professor, Dr. Joel Hillhouse was featured on a CBS Sunday Morning ( Video Clip) report on the health risks of tanning. Dr. Hillhouse, Director of the ETSU Skin Cancer Prevention Laboratory, is an internationally respected authority on tanning, especially the risks of indoor tanning. He spoke both about the risks of tanning and the reasons, both psychologically and socially, that so many people continue to tan despite the wide-spread recognition of those risks. CBS News Article
With a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the State University of New York in Albany, Dr. Hillhouse has a long-standing research interest in how to encourage behavior change among adolescents. Dr. Hillhouse recently received a $2.7 million grant from NIH for an innovative strategy aimed at curbing indoor tanning use among teens. With this grant, Dr. Hillhouse and his research team are focusing on strategies that can help teens recognize that indoor tanning carries both short-term and long-term risksand to focus on those risks most relevant to the teens decision making process. With ETSU Doctoral student Katie Baker, and other members of Skin Cancer Prevention team, Dr. Hillhouse recently published a study in the Archives of Dermatology ( Article Extract) about how mothers impact on the indoor tanning practices of their daughters. The World Health Organizations International Agency for Research on Cancer has assigned sunlamps and sunbeds and other ultraviolet-emitting tanning devices to its highest cancer risk category, carcinogenic to humans. A local story highlighting the work can also be found on tricities.com
