Comprehensive Care for Scars

While scars are the body's way of healing the skin, they sometimes need healing of their own. At the Scar Treatment Center, part of the Lehigh Valley Health Network Burn Recovery Center in Allentown, people can get comprehensive care related to scarring. The center sees 5,000 visits a year from burn, trauma and nonchronic wound patients, ranging in age from a few weeks to more than 100 years of age.

The Scar Treatment Center is headed up by Sigrid Blome-Eberwein, MD, a surgeon who specializes in burn reconstruction. There are two full-time certified registered nurse practitioner providers, in addition to experts from occupational and physical therapy, psychological care, case management, specialized nursing, anesthesia and more.

Often, people with scarring need to go back and forth to visit multiple health care professionals. At the Scar Treatment Center, everything is in one spot. This continuity of care can make a big difference in the outcome. “Instead of needing to go to all these different offices and dealing with all these different people, we can offer all these services under one roof and with one team, so patients get condensed, optimized treatment for their scarring and healing problems,” Blome-Eberwein says.

The services provided at the Scar Treatment Center include:

• Acute wound care, including dressings and pain control
• Scar evaluation and back-to-work evaluations
• OT/PT, compression and splinting
• Outpatient procedures to facilitate wound closure
• Plastic-reconstructive procedures, such as contracture release, expanders, fat injection, subcutaneous contracture release, steroid injection, flap surgery, hand reconstruction, eye/face reconstruction and resurfacing
• Nonablative and ablational fractional laser treatments for scar modulation
• Other light-based treatments/lasers for pigmentation issues and hair growth abnormalities in scars

Most of the procedures and treatments are covered by insurance, although there are some that might not be (such as permanent makeup for scar camouflage, currently in development). For those services that require pre-authorization, the experienced office staff handles communicating with insurance companies.

For nearly two decades, Blome-Eberwein has immersed herself in improving the treatment of scars, which gives her an expansive knowledge base upon which to draw - she knows what to do in order to offer patients the best possible results.

But it isn’t only complex cases the Scar Treatment Center can handle. “We’re not just for burn patients or large, extensive scarring,” Blome-Eberwein says. “We can treat any kind of scar that’s symptomatic, like breast reconstruction scars for breast cancer - those scars are very cumbersome a lot of times. Other examples are breast reductions, abdominoplasties, dog bites to the face, ER sutures that didn’t heal great, bumpy scars on the face or top of nose, or orthopedic procedures, like knee replacements, as well as severe acne scars with keloid formation."