St. Brigid's Centre

Minor Surgical Procedures

Minor surgery performed by your family doctor has long been held to be cost effective.

At St. Brigid's we can perform the following procedures under local anaesthesia

• Electrocautery
• Curettage
• Therapeutic Injections used in a variety of conditions. for example:
• Injections into joints (steroids but also viscosupplementation)
• Aspiration of joints
• Infiltration of tennis and golfer's elbow
• Excisions
• Incisions
• Other procedures such as suturing of lacerated wounds following injury.

Curettage

• Curettage is reserved for superficial lesions like seborrhoeic keratosis or solar (actinic) keratosis that are usually so superficial that removal does not leave a scar.
• Keratoacanthomas can also be removed by curettage but it tends to be deeper and often leaves a scar.

Electrocautery

• Electrocautery can be a useful technique, especially when a lesion is vascular.
• It is useful for removal of skin tags, warts when the diagnosis is usually clear. In obese patients these are often multiple. A little bleb of local anaesthetic is injected into the base of each to make the procedure less painful.

Cryotherapy

• Local anaesthesia should not be used and is not necessary.
• Cryotherapy works by rapidly freezing tissue cells which then thaw causing lysis of cells..
• The art of this technique is to apply enough cooling to destroy the lesion without applying too much and causing collateral tissue damage.
• In our centre we use CryoPen-X therapy.