I've been reading the sciton forum which would be really helpful if I had a sciton but I have a yag plus some other lasers. If there are other yag owners out there, I thought it would be great if we can share some our experiences and settings used. I feel like the company guidelines are safe but not optimal and I keep wanting to go up but of course i'm scared of adverse reactions. For example, what kind of settings are being used for spider veins?

I don't use much for spider veins but in general you can treat up to 3-5mm size veins. The settings are:
3mm spot size, 200Joules, 50ms pulse duration, post cooling ON.

Is there a reason you don't use it for spider veins? do you prefer something else you have? what do you use the yag mostly for? I've been using it mainly for skin tightening and spider veins.

jmd:
Because I used pulse dye laser for spider veins. I favor PD laser for red veins and 1064 for blue veins.
I use ND-YAG mostly for HR, skin tightening and laser peel with Carbon powder.

JMD: There are quite a few decent published studies regarding treatment of vascular lesions with the 1064 nm wavelength and longer pulse durations (i.e., msec domain). Most of the studies confirm that the "sweet spot" for treatment with 1064 nm is vessels with diameters between 1 and 4 mm. For vessels <1 mm in diameter you would probably be better off with pulse dye laser, KTP (532) or IPL which all have a much more shallow depth of penetration than 1064. As a general rule, the larger spot sizes are used with larger and deeper vessels, and vice versa with smaller spot sizes.

I have a gentlelase that I use for hair removal which works great because I have mainly skintype 1-3. But now that summer is coming and more people are tanning, I was thinking of switching more to my gentleyag for hair removal which I currently use for the very few darker skin patients I have.

I was wondering if there's anyone with gentlelase and gentleyag hair removal experience and if they can give me a comparision of final results. I'm getting great results with the LASE on my light skin patients and am afraid they won't be as happy with the YAG results. Also, is it really safe to use it on actively tanned light skin people?

JMD:
I believe it should be safe to do the YAG on tanned light fair skin people since YAG does not go after much of the melanocytes anyway. You probably would never get the same superior resutls from YAG for LHR as with the Alexandrite. But you can get close to it for the light fair skin folks by gradually decreasing the pulse width down to 3ms as the hair gets more "vellous" like

For those of you that use Candela Gentle Yag for Skin Tightening. How effective have you found it to be? How soon do you start seeing results? I would really appreciate hearing your experiences! Thanks

I have Candela Gentlelase Yag and would like to do the laser peels.........can anyone give me the protocol and also where to purchase the carbon powder? I'm finding protocols for Q-switch but not Yag, also cannot find the carbon powder or gel anywhere. I'm in Michigan