Thank you for your question.
You’ve submitted several photos and you’re describing your question that you underwent
CO2 laser which was resulted in having significant loss of pigment describing yourself as ghost
in appearance.
The fact that it left you with a lot of pitted acne-like scars and you’re looking for some
type of solution to help you with improving your skin quality.
Well I can give you some perspective from my practice a little background.
I’m a Board-certified cosmetic surgeon and a fellowship trained oculofacial plastic surgeon
and I deal a lot in New York City where I’ve been in practice for 20 years with people
who have had various thermal related trauma to their skin from aesthetic devices.
Unfortunately your situation is a little more unusual in terms of CO2 laser.
This was a situation, we actually trained with the CO2 laser back in the mid-90s and
at that time, the CO2 laser was very aggressive.
It was ablative.
It was very – creating a lot of heat.
Unfortunately a lot of people have complications, so it actually led to almost an abandonment
of the use of CO2 laser for many years by the majority of colleagues until the fractional
CO2 lasers came in a couple years ago.
In my practice, I use the fractional CO2 laser a lot.
I will tell you that my perspective about how to rejuvenate skin has evolved over time
as I’ve developed methods related to regenerative medicine using some more developed modalities
that build tissue using your body’s own natural abilities.
What I’m referring to is the use of something called platelet-rich plasma.
Now platelet-rich plasma is derived from your own blood and you can learn a little bit about
it by doing a literature search in the National Library Medicine or PubMed so that you can
see that there’s a lot of work done with platelet-rich plasma.
Interestingly in the cosmetic field, a lot of people are not aware of it.
I think mainly because it’s – there’s no big pharmaceutical or laser company promoting
it.
But when you realize that in the modern time that a lot of people are getting overheated
with whether there’s a laser device as what appears to have happened with you, or a thermal
device which is supposed to create non-surgical skin tightening.
People are realizing that they’re losing skin quality.
The skin is getting thinner.
It’s often becoming effectively scarred and they’re losing fat under their skin.
What we’re doing in our practice is we use Platelet-Rich Plasma to try to stimulate the
blood supply to the skin to stimulate the fat cell layer under the skin.
In fact, when it comes to acne scars we use Platelet- Rich Plasma a lot.
We’ve had a lot of success with combining Platelet-Rich Plasma with hyaluronic acid
fillers to give long term more permanent improvement of acne scars.
I think that from my perspective, I would suggest considering Platelet-Rich Plasma as
a way to help you improve your skins appearance.
Platelet-Rich Plasma is not a one-time treatment.
I also describe with like the way you go to a gym to build muscle.
You treat and you observe the result and then you treat again.
The difference with Platelet-Rich Plasma compared to thermal devices is you’re not heating
the skin.
You’re actually stimulating the quality by increasing blood supply and improving and
increasing collagen.
Basically, you’re manipulating the wound healing mechanism that our body already possesses
and you’re leveraging that to improve skin quality.
I consistently seen benefit with Platelet-Rich Plasma and practice for dark under eyes circles
for acne scars as I mentioned before for scar, for skin quality improvement like complexion
improvement.
People who don’t have any problems with the trauma or will come in just for skin quality
improvement because facial aging there’s loss of collagen, loss of blood supply.
You do Platelet-Rich Plasma and the skin gets this remarkable and unique glow to it from
the treatment.
I think that that’s something that I would suggest.
Certainly there’s some topicals maybe a value but when there’s been ablation, I
think that really tissue rehabilitation is the way to go.
I would avoid any other type of thermal devices.
I don’t think you’d pursue that anyway, but certainly it’s unfortunate that you‘ve
had this result but I think that there is some value to this.
Now other ideas also include fat grafting and adipose-derived stem cells.
But since those are more surgically focused procedures while Platelet-Rich Plasma is simply
a blood draw and a treatment the same day.
If you think about a strategy where you treat, you observe and at some point there may be
a plateau, that maybe the time to consider a surgical option to enhance the benefit.
Of course whenever we do fat grafting we also use Platelet-Rich Plasma to improve the outcomes
in that situation as well.
I hope that was helpful.
I wish you the best of luck.
Thank you for your question.