MOHS Surgery

Dr. Robinson performs MOHS surgery at his Alpharetta and Dunwoody practices, combining artistry with advanced techniques in order to remove skin cancer without affecting surrounding tissue.

DR. ROBINSON: MOHS surgery is done by a dermatologist where it’s a dermatologist who’s done extra training in removal of skin cancer, taking all the skin cancer out and minimizing the amount of normal surrounding tissue. So the defect that’s created is as small as possible with a 99% cure rate. So anyone who has a skin cancer, should want to have MOHS excision done, especially on the face. The more complicated areas where we really don’t have any extra skin to close, such as the eyelid, the nose, the lips, those types of MOHS excisions usually end up being sent to someone like myself because you can’t just grab some extra skin next to it like the cheek and just make it close. MOHS reconstruction is very artistic. No two defects are the same, it takes a lot of knowledge of anatomy of the face and a lot of experience of knowing what’s going to work and what’s not because there’s a lot of different ways to close a hole, very simple to very complicated. Some of my most gratifying patients and some of the work I’ve been most proud of has been patients who have had MOHS reconstruction done because one day, you have a little red zit on your nose and then the next day after the incision, you could have half of your nose missing and not know it. So it’s very traumatizing to a patient and it feels so good to be able to come in and reconstruct their nose and make them look totally normal and human again and have a functional life. They really are, especially when you pull up their before photo, because how quickly we forget what we used to look like. And we usually have a picture of when they come in after the incision. And it’s sometimes on the borderline of horrific. You’re like wow, I can’t believe that’s how I looked. And then they look at the after and they look in the mirror and it’s just a big smile and they’re just very thankful.