Scars / Pigmentation
Available at Amrit Clinic, Mulund West, Mumbai. Every treatment starts with an in-person assessment.
Surgical scar revision replaces an unsatisfactory scar with a better-placed and better-orientated one. It suits scars that are wide, badly positioned, contracted or restricting movement. It exchanges one scar for another rather than removing scarring, and for keloids surgery alone frequently makes matters worse.
Key facts
| What it does | Replaces a poor scar with a better one — does not erase |
|---|---|
| Best for | Wide, badly orientated, contracted or restrictive scars |
| Anaesthetic | Usually local |
| Timing | Generally wait 12+ months for a scar to mature |
| Keloids | Need combined treatment — excision alone often worsens them |
| Maturation | The new scar takes 12–18 months to settle |
When surgery is the right answer
Where a scar is flat, pale and simply visible, surgery has little to offer and laser or time will do more. Where it is raised and red but within its original boundary, non-surgical measures usually come first.
- A wide or stretched scar that could be excised and closed more precisely
- A scar running against the natural lines of the skin, which can be reorientated
- A contracted scar restricting movement across a joint or distorting a feature
- A depressed or tethered scar that needs releasing and filling
- A scar with trapped hair follicles or embedded material causing recurrent problems
Keloids need a different approach
A keloid grows beyond the boundary of the original wound and has a strong tendency to recur. Excising one without adjunctive treatment commonly produces a larger keloid than the one removed, and it is one of the more predictable ways to make a patient worse.
Management is combined and long term: intralesional steroid injection, silicone therapy, pressure, sometimes vascular laser, and surgery only as part of that package with immediate post-operative adjuvant treatment. The realistic goal is control, not cure. Keloids are more common in deeper skin tones, so this is a conversation worth having properly before any elective incision anywhere on the body.
Timing
Scars change substantially for twelve to eighteen months. A scar that looks poor at three months often looks acceptable at a year without anything being done. Revising too early means operating on tissue that has not settled and risks a worse result than waiting would have produced.
The exceptions are scars causing functional problems — restricting movement, pulling on an eyelid or the mouth — where earlier intervention is justified.