While most dermatology procedural pain is brief, it may result in lingering stinging or may be required multiple times.  For patients with needlephobia, this can ramp up anxiety on subsequent visits.  Whether you always use topical anesthetics or routinely talk patients through it, Buzzy can help!  [See our Focus Pain Relief and Bee-Stractors pages for more office tricks of the trade from pediatric research.]

For injecting or freezing a wart, place Buzzy on the MP joint where a digital block would go.  Activate the vibration and put a frozen pack under Buzzy's elastic strap.  For maximum pain relief on older patients you may want to wait up to 1 minute, but for a younger child 15 seconds may be sufficient due to their thinner stratum corneum and greater sensitivity to cold.

For a biopsy, curettage pain or cryofreezing on the dorsum of the hand, place Buzzy  proximal.  This image shows an IV stick, but the principle is the same: 1) Place Buzzy directly on the site for 15 seconds 2) Slide Buzzy proximal and hold in place with the "hands free" velcro strap while injecting.  Buzzy's numbing radius averages 11 cm with cold and vibration together, but the closer Buzzy's bottom end is to the pain, the better.

It is important to stay in the same dermatome, "between the brain and the pain."  For information on where to place Buzzy, see our Dermatome page.

The use of vibration for Botox pain was recently described at the AAD 2011 conference.  Dentists have used the wiggle trick for years with oral injections, but injections anywhere can respond the same way.  The advantage to Buzzy over round vibration sources is Buzzy's concave curve to maximize delivery of vibration. The easy ability to add a thin ice pack for increased pain relief is a plus.  Patients can control Buzzy for nasolabial fold injections, or you can slide Buzzy along proximally as you progress.

Recent studies support that itching as well as pain are transmitted along aDelta pain fibers, the same ones that can be blocked by ABeta vibration or C-fiber stimulation with cold.  This Gate Control pain blockade can also help your patients at home.  Whether using Buzzy to rub on itching areas rather than excoriating themselves while waiting for medications to work, or using Buzzy to lessen the burning after cryotherapy, Buzzy is affordable enough to allow home use.

Buzzy has been demonstrated in randomized controlled trials to decrease IV pain by half without distraction, and by 90% with distraction using Bee-Stractor cards.  If a procedure hurts more than an IV, Buzzy will likely help less.  If it hurts less than an IV, Buzzy will likey help more.  We welcome independent investigations into Buzzy's effectiveness, or lack thereof, for dermatologic procedures.  While we're very happy to share our statistical analysis and effectiveness with academicians planning randomized controlled trials, we discourage asking for free samples as you will need to disclose this ethical conflict of interest prior to publication.