>> My name is Terrence.
I am an associate dermatologist
at the Washington Institute of Dermatologic Laser Surgery.
In general, as a dermatologist, I treat skin disease,
so any skin condition I can evaluate and treat.
More towards my specialty is, our interest and our practice interest,
we use a lot of the latest technology, whether laser devices
or energy-based devices, to treat dermatologic disease.
Sometimes that is true, you know, what we call pathology, or disease,
and sometimes it is more for cosmetic uses.
What attracted me to dermatology is everyone is -- they're relatively happy,
but they have something wrong with their skin, and the skin, unfortunately,
is what -- you know, everyone sees that.
It's how you interact with the world.
Your face, you know, and so it can be really psychologically distressing even though,
to their overall health, it might not impact it.
But you can really dramatically change a person's outlook on life,
how they interact with others by changing their physical appearance,
whether through scar treatment, aging, birthmarks, et cetera.
You know, based on our specialty of having laser and light-based devices,
there is a lot of different kind of indications to use them.
We see young infants, childs, with birthmarks,
whether it's a vascular, a blood vessel birthmark.
Those are called hemangiomas, or port wine stains.
And we can use what's called vascular lasers to destroy those birthmarks.
There is also pigmented birthmarks, so we use pigment-specific lasers for.
So we see infants with birthmarks.
We also see scars.
Scars is a big part of practice, both traumatic scars from car accidents, burn scars,
as well as one of the probably most common reasons is acne scarring.
So the atrophic acne scarring on the face is one of our leading causes.
So scar makes up -- scar treatments make up a big part of our practice.
You know, the face is where people tend to focus a lot of their attention on.
Particularly with our cosmetic treatments, the face is predominately
where we work, but you would be surprised.
You know, scarring elsewhere, birthmarks in non-facial locations, stretch marks.
It often, thought, requires multiple treatments.
So, for example, acne scarring, and scarring in general,
we don't guarantee that we can erase scars.
We can't, but we can significantly improve the appearance of scars.