Ex-president Joe Biden attends meet-and-greet with head scar after undergoing Mohs surgery for skin cancer

Former President Joe Biden attended a church in Delaware while sporting a large scar on his head, which was the result of the Mohs surgery he underwent for his skin cancer.

The 82-year-old was seen with the gash while greeting supporters outside a Rehoboth Beach church in footage first shared by Inside Edition.

The night before, he was also seen at a local ice cream shop wearing a baseball cap that appeared to cover the injury.

On August 22, Biden was seen with a bandage covering the same spot on his forehead at the funeral for former Delaware governor and US Representative Mike Castle. 

Biden’s spokesperson later confirmed to Daily Mail that he recently had Mohs surgery done.

The brush with skin cancer comes after Biden previously underwent surgery to remove a basal cell carcinoma from his chest in 2023. He is also currently undergoing treatment for stage four prostate cancer. 

Mohs surgery is used to remove certain types of skin cancers, including some melanomas, basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and other less common skin cancers.

It’s the same procedure his wife and former First Lady Jill Biden underwent in 2023.

It is performed in an outpatient setting and typically takes a few hours. Patients are able to remain awake for the surgery, which requires just local anesthesia to numb the area.

The objective of a Mohs procedure is to excise as much cancerous skin tissue as possible while also doing as little damage to the surrounding healthy tissue as possible. It’s a gradual process and layers of skin are removed in steps.

First, the surgeon uses a scalpel to remove the surface level cancerous skin tissue with the understanding that there might be more cancerous tissue beneath the surface as the bulk of skin cancer is usually hidden under the surface.

The surgeon maps out where on the body the cancerous tissue was extracted, takes that tissue sample to the lab, dyes it, and cuts it into sections. Specialized technicians place those tissue samples on slides to be investigated under the microscope.

The doctor then examines the edges of each section of tissue for evidence of remaining cancer. If the surgeon finds cancer cells under the microscope, their location is marked on the map.

The process is repeated until the doctor finds no evidence of cancer in the sampled tissue.

Some wounds will be big enough to require sutures to close. They typically heal within a couple of weeks. Smaller wounds can heal by themselves in about a month.

Typically people are able to leave between two and six hours after the outpatient surgery, though the timing depends on the size of the area effected.

The procedure is extremely common. Mohs surgery is performed on 876,000 skin cancers per year in the United States.

Biden stunned the nation in May when he announced that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. 

Certain doctors who commented on the situation said it was ‘inconceivable’ that the former president’s condition could have gone undetected for his four years in the White House before it had spread throughout his body. 

His cancer was given a Gleason score of 9 and a Grade Group of 5, a dire stage of the rapidly-spreading disease. The diagnosis came days after doctors found a ‘small nodule’ on his prostate, doctors said at the time.

‘It is inconceivable that this was not being followed before he left the Presidency,’ wrote Dr. Howie Forman, a professor of radiology and biomedical imaging, public health management and economics at Yale.

He noted that the test for prostate-specific antigen would have shown he had cancer ‘for some time before this diagnosis’, given how aggressive it is.

In February 2024, when Biden was the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, his longtime physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor deemed him ‘fit to serve’ following a routine physical at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Because of that, many conservatives have now accused Biden administration officials of covering up the then-president’s health decline.