What are the advantages of Mohs surgery?
By using the mapping technique and complete microscopic control, the Mohs surgeon can pinpoint areas involved with cancer that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye. Benefits include: 1) the highest possibility for curing the cancer and 2) the ability to save as much normal skin as possible. In contrast, standard surgery techniques look at less than 1% of the margins, providing only an estimate of whether the margins are clear. Also, with standard surgery the slides are not examined the same day, allowing the chance of finding a positive margin at an outside pathology lab and having to perform surgery at a later time to clear the margin.