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  • Inside the Doctor's Office: See How Surgery Is Performed to Correct Acne Scarring
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Hi, I'm Dr. Young. I'm going to talk about improving scars that occur with acne, which many people have. Acne scarring can definitely be something that can be traumatic to a young person and it can also carry in through adulthood and what we're going to do is just show you some of the techniques that I do for acne scarring.

I think it's always good to first do excisions and subcision techniques first and then you can follow that up with C02 resurfacing or dermabrasion or some sort of resurfacing technique. That can occur six to eight weeks later or longer if you want to, or wish to wait, but six to eight weeks is a great time to do resurfacing.

Now I'm going to show you a few of the techniques that we do. So, for this area here, this is sort of a scar that we improved before but we're actually going to cut this scar out, because it's a little elevated and it's not really necessarily depressed. So, I think excision would be the best thing for this. There are some other areas that can be improved with just what I call subcision techniques. Now, going back to this lesion, we're going to excise it by taking this area out and then closing it by elevating in front of it and behind it, to bring the tissues together and some of these depressed areas, where many people call pox marks and we in the medical field call them ice pick scars or depressed scars.

There are many options for this. You can do resurfacing but if you really want to get a big improvement, you can excise it or the other thing is to actually cut around it and elevate it, which is called subcision, because you're cutting underneath, which is sub, and you're elevating. The other option is actually to cut this whole thing out and take skin from a healthy area, like behind the ear, and place is in here, to allow it to heal, a sort of a skin graft approach.

After you do all these and you allow it to heal for six to eight weeks, you can then surface the whole area for further improvement. What we're going to do is start with this here and we're going to just cut around this whole lesion, to try to elevate it up a little bit. I'm just going to sort of examine how it looks.

Inside the Doctor's Office: See How Surgery Is Performed to Correct Acne Scarring

This is an introduction of some of Dr. Philip Young's acne scar treatment techniques, including scar excision and subcision.