Treating Your Scars

Don’t start any treatment for scarring until your acne is completely
gone and unlikely to come back. If you go to all the trouble and
expense to undergo a procedure (or multiple procedures) and then
get more acne, and thus more scarring, you have to go through it
all again. Just imagine how expensive that would be!
Skin resurfacing techniques (like dermabrasion), surgical excision,
and fillers have been used to diminish acne scarring for years with
mixed results. Currently, laser therapy has assumed a more impor-
tant role in the treatment of acne scars, and other newer surgical
methods featuring light and radio waves are an option to treat
your acne.
Most scar treatment focuses on facial scars. Generally, scars on
the chest and back don’t respond as well to the treatments men-
tioned hereafter. Because these scars are so hard to treat, the best
approach is to try to prevent them in the first place. If the preven-
tion route fails, the intralesional cortisone (steroid) injections that
I describe in the “Growing out: Collagen running amok” section,
earlier in the chapter, may help to shrink them.
One remnant of the recent past in treating acne scars is the chemi-
cal acid peel. Peels are sometimes used in the treatment of acne
and dark spots (see Chapter 13), and you may still hear about
them in conjunction with treating shallow acne scars. But, for the
most part, the results of chemical peels in treating scars are disap-
pointing, and the method has been replaced by others, notably
lasers, that I discuss.