When it comes to lasers and cosmetic medicine there are some important distinctions to be made. There is a wide array of lasers out there, and their respective uses range across the cosmetic spectrum, from hair removal to skin resurfacing and all things in between.

Lasers for cosmetic medicine are broken down into two broad categories: ablative and non-ablative. I’ll discuss the primary differences these two, and also the various procedures they can be used for. I cover their role in regard to skin pigmentation, acne, skin aging and other lesser know applications.

In this episode, we cover:

• An introduction to lasers and how they work (00:00)
• The broad categories of lasers: non-ablative and ablative and their role (03:10)
• An overview of non-ablative lasers (08:55)
• An overview of ablative lasers (12:10) 
• The importance of knowing your lasers (16:25)

Links:

Dr. Jason Hall, MD

• Website: https://drjasonhall.com/
• Twitter: twitter.com/jhallmd
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jhallmd/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrHallPlasticSurgery/

Transcript

Dr. Hall: Welcome to The Trillium Show, where we help you make the changes you want to see in your body, in your mind, and in your life. I’m your host, Dr. Jason Hall.

Dr. Hall: Hi, this is Dr. Jason Hall and welcome to another episode of The Trillium Show. Today we are going to talk about a subject which I have grown to love over time, which is lasers. Now, lasers are one of these areas in aesthetic medicine and surgery that kind of get a bad reputation because the category of lasers is so vast and so broad that people can have a laser treatment and say, “I had lasers and it really didn’t work for me.”

And the problem is that unless you know exactly what type of laser that you had, it’s very easy to say, “Well, it didn’t work,” because just like in any other area in medicine, if you aren’t using the right treatment for the right problem, you’re not going to get a result that’s anywhere close to what you were hoping for.

There are two main types of lasers: On one hand you have the non-ablative lasers; then on the other hand, you have the ablative lasers. Now, these two broad categories of lasers really do exactly what they say they’re going to do. The non-ablative lasers do not damage the skin itself. The ablative lasers do; they ablate or destroy parts of the skin, and what parts of the skin they damage depends on what problems that we’re looking to treat. So, I think before we really get into what the difference is between non-ablative and ablative lasers are, and what each one of those treat, we need to do just a really quick, like, 30,000 foot view of what lasers are and how they work.

Lasers and light treatments in general—and we’re going to include IPL, or Intense Pulsed Light, or BBL, or Broadband Light in with the laser category—how light treatments work is they work by selectively heating tissue. And what tissues they heat really is dependent on the wavelength of light that we’re using. The targets are known as chromophores, and there are three main chromophores that we talked about in aesthetic medicine: There is reds, or blood vessels and blood cells; there is browns, the pigment, so the melanin that’s in our skin; and then there’s water. And by selecting which one of those chromophores that we’re going to target, we get different results based on that itself. So, not to get too detailed, to sciency, in any of this, but that’s kind of a basic overview of what we are trying to do when we’re talking about lase