Scarless Mole Removal - Everything you need to know (Ep 44)

It seems like almost everybody has got some little bump, some little mole, some little blemish that they want removed. And I have been doing cosmetic mole removals since I opened my practice back in 2015 here in Knoxville. And one of the things that makes this such a fun procedure to do and such a worthwhile procedure for patients is that not many people do it and really do it well.

By that I don't mean to say that people can't remove a mole and make the scar look nice, but that removing a mole almost without leaving a scar is something that very few people do. And I could kind of toot my own horn, take credit for this, and say it's because I'm just such a superior surgeon and that's for, you know, you guys out there to decide. But what it is is that I have a device in the office called a radio wave generator which allows me to remove moles and little blemishes almost completely scarlessly.

And what I wanted to do in this show is to really talk about that technology and why it is such a great addition to our practice and why so many people come here from really from all over the place. I've had people from New York and California, from Nebraska and the Midwest come to Knoxville just to get moles removed like this. So it is a really great technology that I wanted to take a couple minutes and talk about so you know what it is.

What a radio wave generator is is essentially like a cautery unit. In surgery we use a called the BOVI electrocautery and it is a, in fancy terms, a monopolar cautery which coagulates blood vessels so it we can kind of essentially burn blood vessels and things to keep them from bleeding. And a radio wave generator is really a different form of energy that we can use not only in surgery like that but to remove little moles.

It was originally used primarily in dental practices and is the the company that makes this sells many more of these things to dentists and oral surgeons than to plastic surgeons or dermatologists because it is really good for you know making incisions and things in the mouth. The reason that it is so good is because it generates very little heat and heat with a cautery is what causes things to scar if you use it on the skin. If you try and BOVI something or use a cautery to remove something on your skin it's gonna leave a nasty scar because it's a essentially creating a burn.

What a radio wave generator does that's different is that we use it uses high-frequency radio energy to essentially evaporate the tissue and so what we're doing there is creating what in effect is a slow-motion rug burn. And you know when you get a rug burn if you skin your knuckles if you skin your knee it heals over the course of a week or two depending on where it is and how big it is and it leaves a little kind of a pink spot but then after a couple of months that pink spot has faded away and you can barely notice that it was there. And so what the radio wave generator does especially for these moles is it allows me to go really slowly layer by layer and remove that mole create a very surface rug burn that then heals over very quickly and leaves a scar which is almost imperceptible.

Now this works really well on the face in cosmetically sensitive areas. I've used it on the eyelids, the ears, places where traditionally cutting moles out you know removing them surgically and sewing them up would leave a scar we can do this without doing that. It doesn't work well in all areas of the body in thicker skin so the stomach the back that can be an area where the healing just is not quite as predictable and so removing those lesions there surgically typically can be a better option but on the face, on the ears, on the eyelids the radio wave generator is my go-to treatment option for removing these little cosmetic moles.

There's a couple of videos I can link to the to the bottom of the show that show me actually removing these you can see what that looks like. Typically the procedures done under local anesthesia it takes about 10 minutes to do and you're left with a essentially a rug burn that is just a teeny bit larger in diameter than the lesion that we remove that then is allowed to heal over four and five days. Taking care of these is really simple.

The area where we treat can be washed with soap and water. Please don't use any harsh chemicals, any acid peels, any of that stuff until this is healed and that skin is allowed to heal for really a week or more but the the area can be washed with soap and water and then just covered with some Vaseline or a really thick antibiotic ointment. For a lot of these facial lesions I have people cover that area with a little button band-aid at night just to keep the ointment from getting all over your pillow but after about a week these things have completely healed.

For women you can cover those things with makeup or foundation so there you really can't see them and it really is a great treatment option to avoid an excision, a scar, sutures and all of that. You just have to be able to commit the downtime to making the the procedure okay. Don't obviously you don't want to do this right before a weekend when you're going out with your friends unless they're really good friends or you're going on a trip where you're gonna be out in the Sun.

You want to wait until you've you can allow these things to heal at least to the point where they're closed and you can cover them with sunscreen. The radio wave generator has really revolutionized the care of moles and especially these cosmetic moles. Downsides to this is some things can scar and I talk to patients when we are talking about removing a cosmetic lesion like this there are really two things that we have to consider.

One is that nothing is truly scarless so these can leave a scar. I've had very few that have left scars where we've had to come back later and actually remove the scar, put some sutures in and close it as a nice linear incision. The other issue is that if these moles haven't been checked by a dermatologist or are suspicious we need to get a pathologic diagnosis before we remove these.

Obviously you don't want to do this and try and evaporate a melanoma only to have it spread and come back so we want to get a pathologic diagnosis and so biopsying these beforehand can be done. If there's ever a question we certainly do that. A lot of these lesions come here from a dermatologist and so we've kind of gotten that cleared up beforehand but know that with the radio wave generator you know we destroy these and can't evaluate them pathologically so we'll have to plan around that and do that first if necessary.

So really those are the only two downsides to removing lesions like this. There are other lesions we can treat with a radio wave generator but I wanted to take this short show to talk about the radio wave generator, talk about cosmetic mole removal the way that I do it here as opposed to simply excising things. If you have any questions feel free to reach out to the office.

You can call the number on the website. You can reach out to me at through this channel or on DMs. Stay tuned for other great bullshit bullshit.

So you can reach out to me through our website. Feel free to reach out through the website info at drjasonhall.com or DM on Instagram. Thanks.