Burn Scars are the most difficult scars to treat. Matter of fact in the past medicine had little to offer. Once the patient was “stabilized” and the last possible skin grafts were transplanted the measures available concentrated more to comfort the patients with customized compressing dressing, silicone bandages, pain killers and other drugs to fight depression, quite a comprehensible reaction after severe disfigurement. Pain is a permanent, often a life long companion, especially at the junction between healthy skin and burn scars. As these scars mature and age, the fibrotic tissue shrinks, gets harder and restricts the mobility of fingers, arms, legs and neck more and more.

Together with plastic surgeons we speculated if medical needling could be a possible solution. Clinics in Germany and a physician in Kiev/Ukraine carefully started to investigate the possibilities to improve burn scars by medical needling. Burn scars often combine all forms of scars such as hypo-, hypertrophic and keloid scars in combination with hyper pigmentation at the same time. Burn scars usually are thicker and often are very hard, especially when they age. To meet the challenge for burn scar improvement we developed a new Dermaroller model to treat these extraordinary physical and physiological conditions. We investigated time and efforts to find a different steel with special characteristics, and we developed new tooling devices for a harder, but still flexible, non-traumatic needle tip. We succeeded by developing the model MC925, a special Dermaroller only for burn scars. In all modesty we are extremely happy that we have invented this new Dermaroller model that can improve burn scars in quite a dramatic manner to reduce pain, disfigurement, and to improve the physical and psychological situation and condition of countless patients.

The Treatment

Apart from smaller and minor burn scars bigger scar areas must be treated in absolute sterile clinical conditions, usually in “burn centers”. Since topical numbing creams, even the strongest ones, do not penetrate such a scar tissue sufficiently, the medical needling must be done under general anesthetic – at least in most cases.

Treatment intervals

Since burn scars are subject to a very long transformation period, both the patients and the physician need a long abundance of patients – often up to one (1) year to see the final result. (The time factor applies as well as for normal scar treatment or skin rejuvenation, although here the intervals vary between 8 to 12 weeks).

On the left you see a typical case of a lasting erythema after a third-degree burn. It is caused by heat impact that had damaged the vessels contractibility. Medical needling stimulates the proliferation of new vessels with a normal elasticity. The right picture shows the results seven (7) months after one (1) medical needling.

A severe burn scar on a calf. Note the marbled hyper pigmentation on the left picture. The right picture shows the result of one (1) treatment 8 months later.