Dr Bela, Dermatologist, mole removal in The Hogarth MediSpa, West London

A mole removal specialist, Dr Bela can help you with mole removal, a procedure that takes out a dark spot on your skin. You may want to do this for health or beauty reasons.  It might be necessary to cut out a suspicious lesion for skin cancer prevention or it might be a cosmetic consideration either. Mole check is an important step to avoid skin cancer or enhance your look. There are some factors you need to consider before you choose this procedure.

Why moles should be removed?

A mole should be removed if there is a suspicion for being a skin cancer (melanoma). Furthermore, histological assessment also should be done to conclude a proper diagnosis.
Moles also can be removed for cosmetic considerations or due to an exposed location when it is continually irritated by a piece of cloth. In these cases we should consider cosmetic aspects too such as the healing potential of the given area.

How can a mole be removed?

The most important consideration regarding mole removal is the histology verification; which gives us a proper diagnosis based on the analysis made on the cellular level. For this reason any procedure is acceptable which is able to provide us a piece of tissue containing preferably the complete mole with narrow safety margins. The gold standard way of mole removal is minor surgical excision with scalpel and closed up with stiches.

What is a proper way of mole removal?

The gold standard way of mole removal is minor surgical excision with scalpel and closed up with stiches.
Whichever method is used be sure about the following:

  • the result of the mole removal should be a piece of tissue containing the lesion removed, which can be sent to histology verification.
  • narrow safety margins in all direction
  • cosmetically acceptable end result (narrow scar)

What are the risks of mole removal?

There are two groups of risks.
One is skin related: possible formation of overgrowing scar tissue (especially on the chest) or wide scars on the back due to the bigger tension on skin.

The other group of risk is procedure related: if the mole is not removed with free margins all around it can regrow or a so called pseudo-melanoma can appear which is very difficult to be distinguished from real melanoma.
Furthermore, I will never forget the patients with wide spread melanoma metastases and without the primary melanoma. When I asked them about mole removal in the past, they could recall an event when a ‘mole’ had been burnt out without any histological analysis, which was obviously a melanoma.
For this reason all mole removal should performed by a professional who has experience with melanoma diagnosis and via a proper method when there is histology assessment involved.
Another risk is when a suspicious lesion is removed by wide safety margin unnecessarily, especially when it proves to be benign by histology and the patient should live with the disfiguring scare for good. The proper approach is starting with narrow margins and acting based on the histology result.

What is the price of mole removal?

Mole removal performed by Dr Bela is £420 plus £100 for histology analysis. Additional moles £105 each.