Page 46 - Mike Murphy's Blog Posts

Many laser/IPL clinics quote a typical treatment interval of 6 to 8 weeks, which means they are treating too soon, in most cases – this leads to an excess of treatments!! They also quote between 6 and 8 treatments in total, to effectively removal all the hairs in any area.
According to the calculations above, this shows that most clinics are operating at below 60% efficiency, or thereabouts!!
This is mostly due to two reasons:
1) Their treatments are ‘under-performing’ due to low outputs, and
2) They are treating people too frequently.
Both of these will reduce the overall efficiency.
Of course, in the real world, most people will not want to wait 14 or 16 or more weeks between sessions. That’s because people tend to think that a more frequent treatment will generate a faster result.
It doesn’t!!
We are physically restricted by the hair growth cycles, over which we have no control. To achieve the ‘best’ results, we need to wait until the follicles are back in anagen, since that’s the only time we can destroy the germ cells effectively with light and heat.
Applying a treatment too early has no effect if the follicles are in catagen ort telogen phase – those treatments will only treat a smaller number of follicles. In fact, my calculations show that there are situation when a treatment will have ZERO effect since none of the follicles will be in anagen phase at the treatment time. This is particularly true for legs!!
Conclusion
This has been a very interesting, and revealing study.
Yet the results are quite clear – most clinic are doing too many treatments, with a relatively low efficiency. Complete removal of hair follicles in a few sessions is possible, when the correct parameters are applied at the correct times. But this is quite tricky!
Plus we have to contend with impatient clients – that is also tricky to contend with.
In reality, I think we need to ‘re-educate’ the public and tell them that leaving longer time between sessions is for their benefit, not ours. Of course, that has a financial impact on any business, but adopting a more honest approach will always boost a business’s reputation...
Thanks for reading, Mike.
Mike’s Blog Posts 46