heya just thought i'd start a poll off for people who are deciding to get laser therapy. as i am not aware of all the different type of lasers i'm only going to post 2 but if you have had success with another, feel free to contact me.

Hi

The way the poll is set up may be a bit confusing as Vbeam is a type of PDL laser. Just like Toyota is a type of car. Also with Vbeam there are a few different models just like Toyota has different models! (hope this analogy makes sense)


For the poll to work you also need for people to show what they were aiming to treat with the laser therapy

i.e:

• KPRF
• KPAF
• Hair removal to stop irritation caused by shaving when you have KPRF

For instance I have had two VBeam PDL treatments which were successful but I have KPAF so the results for KPRF may not be the same.

I think this info is definately needed. I started a thread a while back as people were just posting "I had laser treatment and it didn't work" without mentioning why, who and what with.


Here is the link:

http://www.keratosispilaris.org/kp-r...-kprf-pdl.html

unfortunately only one person has posted - but it may give you an idea of some questions to include in a poll

Anne:

Please can you give us some examples of lasers that we can add to the poll?

It can help us a lot to understand a little bit more about these treatments.

I hope that you cn help us out, so we can optimize Khrissy's poll idea.

Well I am not really a laser expert but I do know that PDL (pulse dye laser) and IPL (intense pulse laser) are the main two lasers people seem to try on this forum

The fraxel laser has also been mentioned once - have just checked the net for some more info: "Fraxel is a common name for the device that delivers the technology known as “fractional resurfacing ....The best candidates are those with mild to moderate wrinkles who have brown age spots and rough skin, all characteristic findings of actinic damage....This treatment is not for those who have primarily vascular lesions, such as redness, rosacea, telangiectasias or broken capillaries."

refer Lasermed for the full article

So in view of the above IPL and PDL would be the main two lasers to compare. However you have got other variables like I mentioned above that come into it i.e.
what were you trying to treat - how many treatments did you have? Who did the treatments? Was there bruising - do you know what setting was used (i.e. with PDL you can have a low setting and it may produce hardly any results)

I am kind of thinking a questionairre may be better to get a truer response. If you sift through the KPRF forum there is a lot of info on people having treatments - I think Khrissy's idea of putting into some sort of quantative data is great. It is just getting it in a format that gives the true picture of the treatment the person received and what their condition was.

Better still it would be neat if someone in the dermalogical field would do a study of patients with KPRF using both lasers and compare results.

refer Journal of Cutaneous Laser Therapy 2000
for an example of such a study using PDL on KPAF.

Sorry - I can't really think of a way of having a poll that can give a true picture. If it is of any help, from being on this forum for a while PDL has been used the most to treat redness and seems to have been successful.

Maybe we could have a subcategory on the site just devoted to laser treatment results to make it easier for ones to get a clearer picture. I note the whole question of lasers continuously comes up as a new thread on the KPRF forum and unfortunately a lot of the previous threads on it get overlooked.