So let's talk about scarring um because that would be you know, and I assume that you work on people who have key Lloyd's, which is a real like we're learning that key Lloyd's is a real serious thing, but what exactly is it? That's yeah, okay, good, because I was gonna ask to people who get plastic surgery not know that the keyloid. Is they a way for you to know prior to surgery and then deal with it? You know that that's a great question. Key Lloids are
really these tumorous growths of scar tissue. So anytime you cut yourself, you have an incision, or you just bump yourself on the table. If you're a keyloid former, that little laceration, that little cut can evolve into a scar tissue that grows outside the boundaries of that initial incision or scar, and so it then starts growing into other parts of your body and starts to take over and trap hair follicles and lead to all kinds of other issues.
Would you know if you were a keyloid former before you went to have plastic surgery, you might not know. You may have gone your whole life never had a keyloid before and then you had cosmetic surgery or or even a heart surgery or necessary courneus, whatever the surgery is, and then you're you develop a keyloid. And the keyloids are incredibly painful, They continue to grow, often, they itch, They can be incredibly debilitating. They can keep you up
at night. They are a problem that up to of people of color, people of color, Asians, Latins, people of African descent will have. So there's a lot of people in the world that are suffering from keyloids. So pictures of key lloid's right now. And you have worked on some big, big some of those keloid was like, wow,
I didn't even know that we work on. We work on some that are the size of a pea, and we work on some that take over the entire face, take over the entire back, and it's horrible for these patients. We we had a gentleman who came to us from Chicago area, um Keenan, who was featured on our show, who he got his whole church involved because he just
didn't have insurance that would cover his procedure. So he got his church involved to give him a donation to travel all the way to New York to have his surgery and it we couldn't do it in one surgery. It took years, years for us to remove all of the key Lloyds on his face. He couldn't go out. He wore a towel around his neck all the time because they were draining chronics. While they drain pus foul
smelling discharge. We're coming out, and so you're telling me that insurance companies don't see this as being like an issue that should be on the list of things they cover. You know, it takes a lot of fighting. We spend a lot of our time caring for our patients and trying to convince the insurance companies that this is a necessary proceed Now, you imagine walking around with a beard of key Lloyd's just hanging off of your face, and you think that that is cosmetic. To remove that is cosmetic.
It's not cosmetic. It is a medical condition that needs to be paid for by these insurance companies. But the insurance company. Insurance companies know that the vast majority of people that get this are brown people. There are people, and so they don't want to pay for that. Why why? What? What is it some some genetic thing. It is genetic and that's and that is that is the point. We
don't know why it was formed. In my opinion is that evolution somehow wanted to try to create stronger scars because if you cut yourself, and before we had antibiotics, if you cut yourself, you wanted that that cut to heal and never open again. But oftentimes, you know, you've seen a boxer who you know, every time it gets in the ring, that one cut constantly is opening up. So in the in an evolution, maybe we form that stronger scar so that those cuts wouldn't open up, you
wouldn't get that infection, and you wouldn't die. So how did you So did you have a patient that you were doing plastic surgery on who got keyloids and then you were like, oh, shoot, this is an issue. Or do you just have people that showed up like can you help me with this? When we first opened our doors, we had people that just walked in and said, hey,
I've got a keiler. You know, the most common place for a brother having a keyloid is in the back of his neck, because you know, we shave our heads close. The barber get a little too close. They go a little too close. In this the hair follicles shrink below below the skin. As those hair follicles are growing back, or the hair is growing back, it curls. Because we
have curly hair. It creates an ingrown hair, and that ingrown hair creates inflammation that then leads to this big keyloid and so um, yeah, these those that's the most common sight for men. And imagine trying to sleep on that. Imagine trying to sleep on that every single night you are sleeping on a rock. Wow, that can also be us,
I mean I would. So that's like an advocacy issue for people especially, Like I said, I didn't know that other people of color experienced key lloyd NG, but I've seen for black women and again in my family, it's an issue, and it's almost like, you know, it's it's like a it's like a it's like something where I feel like my sister, at some point in her life, she probably dealt with a little bit of insecurity, you know, just because she has key Lloyd's or could not do
certain things, always had to have the clip on airrings. But you know, of course now she's like, hey, it's right here, She's you know, she's cool. But she always said to me, are you sure you cut? Like, let's check it like it's a it's a worry, a concern for everyone that you would get these key Lloyd's. But I had no idea that people were getting them to that extent. Wow, were You're doing God's work, God's work,
that's my slowly. We're very honored to be able to care for our patients because the common theme amongst all of them is that they don't know where to turn they have these We had a patient yesterday who came from Buffalo said she went to twenty practices in Buffalo, even went to the Cleveland clinic, and no one wanted to treat her keyloid. She had a keyloid in the
pubic area, so she was incredibly self conscious. This thing was quite large in their groin area, so she was very self conscious, didn't want to be intimate any longer. And she was just depressed, incredibly depressed, even contemplated suicide. And so she had nowhere else to turn, no other practice. But we at Lexington Plastic certain are specializing in this disorder because we know that there's it's an underserved community that is adversely affected by it. Children too, children as well, ye,