• Video
  • What is CO2 Laser Treatment and How Does it Work?
{{ showTranscript ? 'HIDE' : 'SHOW' }} TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Thomas Bender: Well as far as for fine lines, I love the CO2 laser for resurfacing. What we do is we have a fractionated laser, resurfacing for patients so they have just 4, 5 days of down time; risks that are very, very minimal, and they do real well and the fine lines can actually respond well after in one treatment. Now some patients who want a lot of tightening, they'll have 2 or 3 treatments, spaced about 4 to 6 weeks apart. We do topical anesthesia, usually we let that sit on the patient's skin for 45 or 60 minutes and then the patient really doesn't have any problem with discomfort during the procedure. Now it maybe feels a little bit hot for now or after the procedure and then after that, there's no pain. There's a lot of healing happen in the first couple of days afterwards though. Patients usually if like the procedure on the Friday afternoon, they'll back at work on Monday, they're still red, they're still have a little bit of peeling probably but if they want to go to work, they can.

Some patients opt to take a couple of extra days off, so maybe they go back on Tuesday or Wednesday. The beautiful thing about CO2 is there have been some studies done that actually show that it can actually decrease pre-cancerous lesions, decrease sun damage and therefore maybe it reduce your risk for skin cancer. So there's actually some medical necessity reasons you can have a CO2 laser done. It's not covered by insurance of course but we get some other benefits from the CO2 laser. So we can turn by the clock a little bit of the time and then the aging process starts again. Of course we ask our patients please wear sun screen at a minimum after your procedure. And we also, of course, try to get them to use a good skin care line. Maybe a Retin-A, maybe a T&S Serum, something that's going to regenerate collagen for them going forward.

What is CO2 Laser Treatment and How Does it Work?

Dr. Thomas Bender discusses how the CO2 Laser Treatment works.