Anything to help with pain routing CO2 Laser Treatment?

Question

Is there anything I can buy to help with pain during the CO2 laser, 3rd treatments the end of July? I purchased numbing cream off Amazon & applied 2 hrs before my 2nd laser, it helped with my face feeling LESS like it's on fire, I still felt the laser piercing though my skin & spent the session kicking in pain. The woman who was doing my treatment just said "No Pain, No gain!" when we were talking through my 3rd laser & said I should consider getting another 4 treatments.

Luis Villar, MD, FACS · Answer

We performed 350 full face CO2 laser resurfacing procedures when the Coherent Ultra-pulse Laser first came out.  At first we experimented with one, two and three passes. When patients healed in a few days the results were poor.  As we progressed to more aggressive three to five layer passes it took exactly two weeks to heal and we obtained meaningfull results.  We placed the patients under IV sedation.  We found topical creams or dental blocks to qualify as torture in our opinion.  A properly performed CO2 resurfacing should take 14 days to heal just like a phenol peel.However after 350 cases and producing a teaching video for physicians, we found that laser resurfacing was inferior to Phenol/Crotin oil peels.  Laser did not remove deep etched wrinkles as effectivly, and any results achieved only lasted about two years.  Our Phenol Peels lasted 5 to 10 years and the down time was exactly the same two weeks.Multiple light treatments under local are painfull and unlikely to produce optimal results.  We have abandoned CO2 Laser for resurfacing.  We use Urbium Laser to treat superficial brown spots and touch up eyelids.  For deep etched wrinkles, there is nothing that comes close to Phenol/Crotin oil peel. We apply this under anesthesia for twenty minutes.  By this time the mixture penetrates deep enough to numb the nerve endings which accounts for the large number of patients that have minimal pain after phenol.

Jason Emer, MD · Answer

You can be asleep for this procedure or in our office we do topical creams, medications, and dental nerve blocks so the procedure is more comfortable. I recommend following up with a cosmetic dermatologist for a formal evaluation and after care recommendations. I recommend skin care with vitamin c, b5 hydrator, silicone based scar gels with growth factors and enzymatic washes with papaya enzyme for after care. Sun protection is essential. Lasers like Co2 work best in combination with other treatments in order to improve the skin's texture and collagen. After Co2, I recommend adding fraxel lasers, microneedling/prp and radiofrequency treatments. Best, Dr. Emer

Anything to help with pain routing CO2 Laser Treatment?

Answers (2)