Acne Treatments with Laser Procedures

There are many acne treatments with laser procedures available to pick from. Are they worth the cost and discomfort involved?

Personally, I don't think using lasers for acne is the best approach for most people. When you look at the following facts:

• Each treatment costs hundreds of dollars, depending on which brand is chosen.
• Multiple treatments are necessary to see results.
• Treatment results are temporary because they usually just kill acne causing bacteria that can come back.
• Any sort of permanent results would be attributed to permanent damage to the skin, which would lead to many other negative side effects.
• Long term results of treatment are not known.

Why wouldn't you look for the other options available to you? Yes they generally take more work then a few simple doctor's visits, but the long term results are worth it.

Using Lasers for Acne

Despite all the downsides I mentioned above, you may still want to look into use acne treatments with laser procedures. That's totally fine, and I will do my best to help you make the most informed decision possible.

So how do the laser treatments work? Well most of them work by killing the acne causing bacteria, p. acnes. They do this by exciting a special compound called porphyrins, found only inside p. acnes.

This means that laser treatments work great with regular zits like papules and pustules which have the bacteria inside the pimple. But for comedonal acne, like plain whiteheads and blackheads, there isn't any bacteria to really kill in the first place. Also, severe inflammatory acne with nodules and cysts exist for reasons beyond just p. acnes bacteria, so laser treatments would likely not be 100% effective.

In fact, most studies show treatments results to be somewhere around 30-80% effective. These studies are usually sponsored by the laser treatment companies themselves anyways, so a bias is present.

Doctors/dermatologists generally recommend at least three treatments, spaced about 1 month apart. Some of them apply ALA (5-aminolevulinic acid) to increase the efficacy of the acne treatments with laser procedures.

Acne Care Laser Skin Treatments

Here are some of the brands of laser acne treatments available:

• Fraxel
• Smoothbeam
• N-Lite
• V-Beam
• CoolTouch
• Isolaz

Whether or not you choose to use lasers for acne is ultimately up to you. I believe it is certainly interesting technology that holds a lot of potential, but I also believe the technology is in its infancy. I never personally used lasers to treat my acne. There are many other treatment options available, so I think you should only consider this as a last resort.

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