[music] Hello, I’m Dr. Neal Schultz
[pause]
and welcome to DermTV.
Mole removal is so easy. It takes a dermatologist less than a minute to
remove a raised mole and, invariably, after the procedure, the patient
says, “That’s all there is to it? I can’t believe I waited so many years to
have that mole removed.” Moles can either be raised, which are the most
common ones and what most people are referring to when they’re talking
about moles, or they can be flat, but today, we’re just going to talk about
removing raised moles.
Moles are a collection of a very large number of normal pigment cells
called melanocytes and something that’s very special about raised moles is
that, in addition to the portion of the mole that’s raised above the skin,
there’s almost always an equal portion of the mole, an equal shape below
the skin. Most people recognize moles as raised bumps on the skin,
especially on the face. They can be skin-colored or they can have some
brown or black color on the top. In addition, many moles have hairs in
them. The reason that most people want to remove their moles is that they
just don’t like the way they look. Most of these moles are acquired during
life, not born with them, so when patients see them appearing newly on
their face, they just don’t like them. But the good news is removing them
is so easy. A little bit of local anesthesia is injected into the skin
right underneath the mole, then a flat instrument shaped like a knife is
used to literally slice the portion of the mole that’s raised off the
surface of the skin and that portion of the removed mole is sent to the
laboratory, not because it’s abnormal but everything that’s removed is sent
to the laboratory for biopsy. This way, we never get surprises. It takes
about a week for the surface where the mole was removed to heal, and it
results in pink skin which then takes a couple of weeks for the pink color
to fade. We get excellent, excellent cosmetic results with flat skin which
is usually skin-colored which means there’s nothing to see where the mole
was removed. On occasion, less than 10% of the time, when there’s color
inside the mole, not just at the top, not just on the bottom, but if the
color is right at the level of the skin where the mole was removed, then
it’s possible to see some of that color back in the skin when the skin
heals and, in that case, when the skin heals, it’s still flat but, instead
of being skin-colored it can be dark-colored or whatever color the mole
was. So, if you have moles that you’re not crazy about and that you’d like
to have removed, see your dermatologist for fast, easy mole removal.