Use of Traditional Curved Iris Scissors or the Wuennenberg Modified Curved Iris Scissors for Skin Surgery

Overview

Every year thousands of dermatologic surgery procedures are performed at the University of Missouri Department of Dermatology, including Mohs Micrographic Surgery (MMS), Excisions, and biopsies. Surgery is known to cause anxiety for patients and with these procedures performed under local anesthetic on awake patients', the sights, sounds, and smells experienced during the procedure can lead to an increase in their anxiety or affect their overall perception of the experience. From performing and assisting with dermatologic surgery the noise associated with the use of the traditional curved Iris scissors provokes an increase in patient awareness to the procedure resulting in increased anxiety, triggering of the vasovagal response, and expressions of annoyance by the patient. However, the modified curved Iris scissors make almost no noise. The Investigators hypothesize that if patients were given the comparative experience of both types of curved Iris scissors during dermatologic surgery, then they will choose the modified curved Iris scissors because the lack of noise will be perceived as more pleasant experience. Our objective is to perform a prospective, single blinded, randomized controlled trial to determine how the noise of traditional curved Iris scissors vs the silent Wuennenberg modified curved Iris scissors affects patients during dermatologic surgery.

Conditions