Question: I’m considering laser skin resurfacing to take care of some acne scarring on my face. Is the process painful? Do you use any anesthesia or a numbing agent when performing this procedure?

Answer: Acne scarring is one of the most difficult to successfully treat, and I tell my patients never to expect complete resolution of acne scarring but rather to expect a significance improvement in the appearance of the acne scarring.  With that said, acne scarring requires very deep treatments in order to improve it at all and, therefore, we need to get this area considerably numb; otherwise, the procedure would be way too painful to tolerate.  This can be as simple as just injecting a small amount of anesthetic underneath the skin that we want to treat or in cases where patients want a full face treatment they may even want to consider going to the operating room and undergoing general anesthesia though that is relatively unusual.  The injections to get the area numb can be slightly uncomfortable but certainly are not unbearable and once the area is numb the laser resurfacing procedure is actually completely painless.  The recovery period also is essentially painless though the area does need to heal and this can take five or six days for complete resolution.  At that point the patient can wear cover makeup for residual pinkness, and I recommend that patients consider three separate treatments spaced at least a month apart to maximize their improvement.  With most patients regarding acne scarring, I am recommending the ProFractional Laser by Sciton, which lasers small tunnels in the skin which creates a large amount of healing and new collagen deposition that in turn then improves the surface irregularities of the acne scarring.

Question: I’m interested in laser resurfacing and wondering if there’s one type of laser that’s considered the best or if different lasers are used for different problems.

Answer: There are a multitude of different lasers out on the market that target different molecules in the skin.  Some are ablative, which means that they create a significant injury to the skin that requires healing while others are what is considered non-ablative, which means that they only heat up the tissue but do not destroy any tissue and, therefore, healing is much less intense and quicker.  Overall, I think it is very important that you seek out a very experienced provider that has extensive knowledge in your area of interest and having said that I would recommend a board-certified facial plastic surgeon or board-certified plastic surgeon since they would be specializing in your area of interest.  Ultimately, we want to customize the treatment and the laser device so that we can give the patient the best result possible while minimizing any sort of risks and downtime.