Living in Southern California has many benefits. The diversity of people, the scenery, and the weather is unmatched in terms of sunshine, warmth, and providing the ability to do so many activities outdoors, even in the middle of winter!
With that luxury and accessibility comes some drawbacks, however. The sun can be fun but too much sun can have alarming effects on your skin, especially if your skin type is fair. The years of sun exposure really do accumulate causing uneven skin tones, brown spots, and ultimately lines and wrinkles that can become very deep and etched.
There are many advertised treatments for mild to moderately sun damaged skin. For those with moderate to deeply sun damaged skin, with very etched lines and wrinkles, the treatment must reach a certain level of thoroughness for those lines, wrinkles and brown spots to go away. Truth be told microdermabrasion (which is different than dermabrasion), photofacials, IPLs, Thermage, Ulthera, and nearly all fractional CO2 lasers simply do not meet this level of thoroughness. I would love for them to do so but, unfortunately, they simply do not.
For patients with sun damaged skin such as illustrated here, Dr. Miller used the UltraPulse laser, the gold standard in laser technology.
This type of laser technology is found only in the Active Fx fractional CO2 laser by Lumenis. Other fractional CO2 lasers simply do not have the technology or the specifications to match what the Active Fx laser and its UltraPulse technology can do. With the UltraPulse technology the results are real and the treatments very tolerable, and can be adjusted to meet mild to very deeply sun damaged skin.
Timothy R. Miller, M.D.
