Dr. Marc Taylor is a Board Certified plastic surgeon with almost 20 years of experience treating patients with lasers. He was one of the first physicians in the country to use lasers to treat skin conditions such as tattoos, brown spots, broken blood vessels, spider veins, cancers, and wrinkles. He has recently been the first physician in San Antonio to purchase the new Epilaser. The Epilaser is a unique laser that was developed specifically to remove hair.

     Individuals with tattoos frequently wish to have them removed. Today, the use of a laser or surgery to cut the tattoo out are the two methods that are the standard in removal of tattoos. There are many types of lasers, and some lasers work well in removing the inks in the skin.

    The area with a tattoo can have scarring and loss of pigment in the skin from when the tattoo was put on. The cells of the skin with some tattoos are scarred and changed, so that the skin is never "normal" again. The laser works well in removing the inks, especially the blacks and reds, but the process is not perfect. The laser light passes through the skin and is absorbed by the ink color. This blasts the ink and some of the cells into small pieces, which come off or are absorbed by the body with time.

   The treatments can be done under local anesthesia in the office. Treatment often results in open areas, similar to a scraped knee, and take 4-10 days to heal. During the healing time the areas need to be covered and ointment applied. The areas should remain out of the sun and be covered with sun block. The inks fade with each treatment, but most tattoos take at least 3-8 treatments. Those tattoos that have a lot of ink, or blue and green ink, and cover a large area, take more treatments. Some tattoos cannot be removed without some degree of scarring, and it is impossible to be exact in how many treatments it will take to remove a tattoo. Many times the areas already have scarring and the removal of the ink exposes the white, scarred areas.

  The removal can be a long process for many tattoos, since a laser treatment can only be given once every 6-8 weeks. Each treatment session costs $195.00 for 10 minutes and $10.00 per minute after the first ten minutes when treating large areas. Most tattoos take 3-8 laser treatments