Will a Melanoma Grow Back from Shave Biopsy?

Biopsies of suspicious moles are often performed by a shave technique. If the biopsy comes back as a melanoma, additional treatment should be performed. At a minimum, this includes re-excising the mole to ensure a clear margin is obtained with no residual melanoma is left behind. Unlike the shave biopsy, the re-excision is performed with a scalpel and the wound is closed with stitches. Depending on how severe your melanoma is, additional tests and procedures, such as a sentinal lymph node biopsy, might be recommended. The chance of your melanoma recurring at the biopsy site or elsewhere, depends on the severity of the melanoma.

A shave biopsy, rather than excisional biopsy, is problematic when melanoma is suspected.  Melanoma is staged based upon the depth or thickness of the lesion, so when it is shaved, you lose the ability to accurately assess the thickness for the purposes of establishing a course of treatment, beyond wide excision, and prognostication.  Any melanoma should be treated by wide excision with significant margins.  I am curious to know why you think a melanoma might have been misdiagnosed as benign.  The pathology slides can be re-reviewed by another laboratory; I personally send all my specimens to a dermatolopathologist who specializes in lesions rather than a general pathology laboratory.  Melanoma is a serious disease which can be deadly so, if you have any reason to believe that you did have a melanoma, I would encourage you to seek treatment from a team including a board certified dermatologist and plastic surgeon, who could then determine what further evaluation and surgery might be necessary and whether referral to an oncologist would be appropriate. Best of luck.  Dr. K