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Some are infections from bacterial bad dudes and need antibiotics, and some from fungi (not real fun guys). Others are from noninfectious processes such as lupus and are treated differently. These can frustrate your follicles by festering but don’t cause any damage medically.
Examples of the pimply process would be the folliculitis on guys’ necks after they shave with almost anything — blade, electric hsaver or chainsaw. It can be chronic and sore but not serious, and can make a guy furious from the scabby, painful pustules that pop up.
Customarily, the first treatment attempts are topical or oral antibiotics, sometimes with results, but not always.
Another variety is called pseudofolliculitis barbae, where the hairs are curly and grow back into the cheek skin after being shaved to a sharp point. This puncture causes a red pimple, called a “shaving bump.”
Let’s not forget ladies who shave their legs to have smooth, silky skin. Sometimes, after eons of shaving, they can suddenly become plagued with pestersome pustules and pimples each time they shave.
A disease that can do serious damage to armpits and/or groins is a recurrent follicle infection with boil-like bumps that hurt and lead to scarring. It is called hidradenitis supperativa. Its spectrum can be range from mild to hideous and disabling.
For a doctor attempting to clear these conditions, it can be consummately bewildering as to what next to try when all the medicinal measures fail. Belt sander? Amputation? Barbecuing? Ah ha! That’s it! Barbecuing.
All hair removal lasers or other light sources funnel through the same mechanism. The light’s target is the brown pigment in the hairs and follicle cells when they are actively growing. Somehow the light is absorbed by the color and converted into heat, which fries the follicle. After enough treatments, generally three to six, the hair and follicle are toast, gone to that big epidermis in the sky.
Using basic Bohemian, simple-minded logic (the only kind for this Bohemie), I said to myself, “No follicle, no infection.” So I have used the laser for these “hairy” medical maladies and given relief to all of the dilemmas described above, without scarring or any other permanent marks.
Such laser treatment for hair removal, done conservatively and appropriately, is very safe.
In most of these cases, loss of the hair is a side effect that must be accepted for purposes of appearance. In most instances barbecuing these bumps to destroy the cutaneous bunkers of miserable microbes is a justification for this side effect, which many times is a plus. However, the number treatments to essentially sterilize the follicles with the heat often is not always enough to cause hair loss, should the latter be a secondary goal, and further follicle fries are in order.
Not everyone has as expensive a tool as a hair removal laser, say $90,000 to $100,000. If it is an available possibility, it could be a relief for your flustered follicles, even if it doesn’t get every single one.
Perhaps we could call the technique follicles flambeau? (That’s not meant to be an incendiary remark).
