Posted by Thomas Sult MD on Tue, Apr 20, 2010 @ 08:59 AM
So here we are at the ASLMS (American Society for Laser Medicine & Surgery) Annual Meeting and Exhibit. I’m sitting in our Fotona booth and looking around and I see SmartLipo, Smooth Lipo, Slim Lipo and Cool Lipo…and they all are one-trick-pony boxes. In contrast, Fotona’s Lipo and Endo-Vascular unit is about $40,000 cheaper than our closest competitor and it’s more powerful.
I’m looking around at these machines and take Slim Lipo, for example. They display a graph with all the different laser wavelengths and it’s claiming that the best wavelength is 924nm. I had talked about that wavelength in a previous post, talking about how 924nm has a very high absorption into fat. At first blush, that might seem like a good idea doesn’t it? But when you’re very highly absorbed, you get a very hot core and in lipolysis, we’re not trying to ablate – we’re trying to heat. So at 924 you get a small volume of fat heated. At 1064, because it has a much lower affinity for fat, you get a very large area that is heated and thus more efficient melting which means fewer passes and a more efficient treatment.
So when looking at lasers, remember that if you’re trying to ablate something, clearly you want a high affinity. If you want to heat something – you don’t. And it turns out that 1064 nm has kind of an intermediate absorption in fat. It’s got a higher absorption than 1320nm, but far lower than 924 nm.
Take a look at the Fotona lipolysis machine called the Focus XP-2.
Posted by Thomas Sult MD on Mon, Nov 16, 2009 @ 05:00 AM
On the surface of it an IPL looks like a great deal. It has so many things it can do. The problem with an IPL is that it is a‘jack-of-all-trades’ and master of NONE.
What is an IPL? IPL stands for Intense Pulsed Light. It is basically a really bright light. In fact, the light is created by a flash lamp like the ones used to “pump” or stimulate real lasers. This bright light is put through a “cutoff filter” to give you only a part of the spectrum of light. The problem is the spectrum is still too broad to have any real specificity. Clinically, that means you are not focused on any one target. Instead you are bulk heating the tissue. For some applications this will work, unfortunately the risks are greater.
It is much like medication. Some have a wide therapeutic index, while others have a narrow therapeutic index….the difference between therapeutic and toxic. An IPL has a narrow margin between therapeutic treatment and burns to the skin.
With a real laser you have more control. It is not just about the wavelength (although that is important), it is about much more. The wavelength is just one factor. Different wavelengths are absorbed by different targets in the skin (called chromophores). So selecting a wavelength is important. But control of the delivery of the laser is of equal or greater importance. In our white paper on the Fotona Nd:YAG lasers we go through the many variables that are important in control of the laser. They include the pulse duration, spot size, the attach-and-decay of the beam discharge and other parameters. While all of this seems complicated, it really is not. We have a sophisticated computer controlled interface… it’s so sophisticated it is simple, and isn’t making it simple exactly the point? Fotona has a bunch of proprietary and patented technologies - all designed to give you better outcomes with less effort.
While the IPL will have perform “fair to good,” our lasers will perform no less than outstanding to excellent. With an IPL you have a Swiss army knife, an excellent tool for emergencies. With a Fotona laser you have a master craftsman’s shop!
