Beyond prescription medications, we offer a number of services in our office. So for example, if you have these nodules or you have a really inflamed breakout that’s not responding to treatment, we can do injections of cortisone. It’s a diluted Kenalog that gets injected directly into the acne breakout, takes the inflammation down, and helps with redness as well. So something that may take weeks, even months to go away on its own, that process of resolution can be expedited by using an injection. Some people get improvement resolution within a week’s time or something like that.
We also offer acne surgery. So that’s a process where an aesthetician will come in, especially for blackhead and whitehead acne, if there’s an area that’s difficult, that’s just not responding to treatment, or it’s difficult to reach with treatment; for example inside the ears, the nose, the lips. She can surgically open up that pore, get that clog out, and that will resolve those breakouts a little bit more quickly. We offer chemical peels. There’s a number of them that we offer, and they vary in severity, so we can use very gentle ones to help with just, again, have exfoliating and opening up those pores. We have more aggressive ones that can help with pigment scarring, sometimes even indented scarring, so there’s a number of options that patients would have in regards to that.
She also does something called micro-needling. So that’s a procedure where she holds a wand of sorts that has a collection of needles at the tip. The needles will penetrate the skin, cause some trauma to the skin, which then causes the immune system to come in and replace that collagen and lift that scar, so it helps with any indented scarring that might be happening.