Learn about the health and cosmetic services performed by dermatologists to treat skin disease
Learn about the health and cosmetic services performed by dermatologists to treat skin disease
Job description of a dermatologist.
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Transcript
My name is Terrence, I'm a associate dermatologist at the Washington Institute of Dermatologic Laser Surgery. In general, as a dermatologist, I treat skin disease-- so any skin condition, I can evaluate and treat. More towards my specialty is-- our interest and our practice's interest-- we use a lot of latest technology, whether laser devices or energy-based devices to treat dermatological disease. Sometimes that is true-- you know, what we call pathology or disease, and sometimes it's more for cosmetic uses.
What attracted me to dermatology is everyone's-- they're relatively happy, but they have something wrong with their skin. And their skin, unfortunately, is what everyone sees. That's how you interact with the world, your face, and so it can be really psychologically distressing, even though to their overall health it might not impact it. But you can really dramatically change a person's outlook on life-- how they interact with others-- by changing their physical appearance whether through scar treatment, aging, birthmarks, et cetera.
You know, based on our specialty of having laser and light-based devices, there's a lot of different kind of indications to use them. We see young infants-- childs with birthmarks, whether it's a vascular or a blood vessel birthmark-- those are called hemangiomas or port wine stains. And we can use what's called vascular lasers to destroy those birthmarks. There's also pigmented birthmarks, so we use pigment-specific lasers for, so we see infants with birthmarks.
We also see scars. Scars is a big part of our practice, both traumatic scars from car accidents, burn scars, as well as one of the probably most common reasons is acne scarring. So the atrophic acne scarring of the face is one of our leading causes. So scarring makes up-- scar treatments make up a big part of our practice.
You know, the face is where people would tend to focus a lot of their attention on. You know, particularly with our cosmetic treatments, the face is predominantly where we work. But you'd be surprised. You know, scarring elsewhere, birthmarks, in non-facial locations, stretch marks. It often, though, requires multiple treatments. So, for example, acne scarring and scarring in general, we don't guarantee that we can erase cars. We can't, but we can significantly improve the appearance of scars.
What attracted me to dermatology is everyone's-- they're relatively happy, but they have something wrong with their skin. And their skin, unfortunately, is what everyone sees. That's how you interact with the world, your face, and so it can be really psychologically distressing, even though to their overall health it might not impact it. But you can really dramatically change a person's outlook on life-- how they interact with others-- by changing their physical appearance whether through scar treatment, aging, birthmarks, et cetera.
You know, based on our specialty of having laser and light-based devices, there's a lot of different kind of indications to use them. We see young infants-- childs with birthmarks, whether it's a vascular or a blood vessel birthmark-- those are called hemangiomas or port wine stains. And we can use what's called vascular lasers to destroy those birthmarks. There's also pigmented birthmarks, so we use pigment-specific lasers for, so we see infants with birthmarks.
We also see scars. Scars is a big part of our practice, both traumatic scars from car accidents, burn scars, as well as one of the probably most common reasons is acne scarring. So the atrophic acne scarring of the face is one of our leading causes. So scarring makes up-- scar treatments make up a big part of our practice.
You know, the face is where people would tend to focus a lot of their attention on. You know, particularly with our cosmetic treatments, the face is predominantly where we work. But you'd be surprised. You know, scarring elsewhere, birthmarks, in non-facial locations, stretch marks. It often, though, requires multiple treatments. So, for example, acne scarring and scarring in general, we don't guarantee that we can erase cars. We can't, but we can significantly improve the appearance of scars.