Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Dr. Lisa Benest, a dermatologist in Los Angeles, California, and today I want to tell you how to get rid of acne and blackheads. We have a patient here, Savannah, who has mild acne, but she has some blackheads around the nose and I wanted to go over the different ways that we can treat acne. First off, acne is very common in teenage years as most of us know but it can extend into adulthood and many of the treatments we use for the younger patients can also be applied to the older patients. Usually during puberty the hormones create changes in our pores causing the cells to be very sticky in the pores and blocking them up creating what we know as blackheads. Now one of the most common tools we use for acne and blackheads are prescription creams and the one we know most is Retin-A but many can be used and the way this cream works is it helps the pores to shed their dead skin cells more rapidly and thus eliminating the blockages. So we will almost always use this in conjunction with whatever tool we use to get rid of the acne. Today I'm going to show you how we extract blackheads using a fancy tool we call comedone extractor. Comedone is just a name that we use in medicine for blackhead. Now this is our comedone extractor and you can see it's a metal rim around the outside with an opening in the center and we place the opening right over the pore and press down gently and then the blockages comes out. Now after extracting the blackheads there is a little bit of redness on the skin from pressing but that goes away quite rapidly. In addition to the treatment we did today I'm going to have Savannah go home and use some cream on her skin that will help further clear the pores and keep it clearer on a maintenance basis. So what I've selected for her today was something called Retin-A and she's going to put a little bit on her fingertip every night and dab it around the face and just do a light layer blended in on to the skin and we'll see her back in a few months to see how she is doing. For people with more severe acne I might add some other things such as a topical antibiotic or even an oral medication just depends on the individual. Thank you very much for watching today. I'm Dr. Lisa Benest in Los Angeles, California and this is how we treat acne and blackheads.