I am considering laser to remove my breast lift scars. How long after surgery should I wait?
My honest and blunt opinion is that a laser treatment will waste your money. The scars will NOT be removed. The scars may not be improved compared to if they were left alone. I would wait it out, and talk with your surgeon about inexpensive no risk topical treatments that will work.
sek
There is truthfully no such thing as "laser scar removal". Once you have a cut or incision, you will always have a scar. Scars take quite a while to fully mature, and they go through a normal healing process. Right after surgery (the first few weeks), the skin is touching and the scar might look great. For the first 6-8 weeks after the incision, the body piles up collagen (a building material used to heal scars), and the scars become noticeable and thick. After that, the body starts re-orienting the collagen components in scars, rearranging them along lines of tension, and small muscle cells (myofibroblasts) try to make the scars smaller with contraction. This whole process of scar maturation takes 1 to 2 years (when viewed under a microscope), but for most people looking at scars from the outside, it varies from 6 to 18 months. Scars are considered mature when they are flat and no longer red.
Most of the lasers that are proposed to "remove" scars are really aimed at getting rid of the redness. The laser is tuned at the red pigment, and removing it makes them appear more mature. The problem is that this redness is due to the hypervascularity of healing scars, and the myofibroblasts (muscles are red) that are trying to shrink the scar. So if you are going to use one of these lasers, you are paying money for something that would happen by itself in a few months, and you are short changing yourself by not letting the scar shrink!
There are some resurfacing lasers that can be used on mature raised scars to camouflage and contour them into the surrounding skin, but this is not what people are normally talking about when they ask for "laser scar removal". Be sure it is worth spending money on before you sign up.
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