Dermatology and The Laser

Laser therapy is a procedure that emits an intense band of light. In medicine, lasers are used because those intense bands of light can be specially tailored for a particular purpose. Lasers can vaporize wrinkles off the surface of the skin and stimulate new skin, and they can remove pigmented age spots or tattoos.
For skin, we treat several different things. We treat things that are made out of blood vessels, which are red, and we treat things that contain pigment, which are brown. Different types of light are absorbed or interact with either red or brown colors. Skin pigment is varying shades of brown, and blood vessels are red. So these are the two colors that the laser interacts with. The reason we can destroy topical problems on the skin without harming anything else is that the laser energy is only absorbed by those spots and nothing else. So we can actually remove something without touching the rest of the skin as you would if you burned something off or cut it out.