A physician's quest to help tattooed patients gain employment inspired him to launch a referral service that matches patients with providers who can remove the ink.
While working in his medical practice on the Lower East Side of New York City, David Ores, MD, had a lot of patients asking to either cover up or remove tattoos. Many of the tattoos were representative of human trafficking survivors, gang affiliations, or time spent in prison.
Emphasis is placed on helping "any person who wants to help themselves with prison/gang tattoos on the face, hands, or neck," according to the website.
In what may be viewed as evidence of its success, on April 28, the program posted a notice stating:
"Fresh Start has to place a temporary hold / freeze on any new clients as of today. We currently have over 1800 applicants and need to work to assist those. We simply do not have the help / resources to accept more at his time. Once we get many of the existing applicants assistance, we will open the applications again."
Ores spoke with HealthLeaders Media recently about the program:
On creating the service: Around 2009, the machine failed after five years. I wanted to continue the project and I realized that it could help people in New York if I found someone else who would agree to remove the tattoos.
I could make a referral service, and that's where I started the idea of the Fresh Start program, just to make a referral service on a website.
It might as well be national, because it doesn't matter where the person is. If they call me from San Diego, then I can find a provider in San Diego willing to help that person.
On the technical limitations: Black ink on white skin is the easiest to remove, and black on any other type of skin is the second easiest. Red ink isn't too bad. Sky blue is super difficult to remove, and yellow is impossible.
The reason behind all of that is that each color has a specific wavelength. There is no laser yet that makes the wavelength to disrupt or break up yellow or sky blue.
On furthering the project: One day if we have a little money, we can pay the providers $50 per treatment as an honorarium. I think if we paid $50 or $100 per treatment to the doctor for "volunteering," we would have a lot more compliance.
It can cost $2,000 to $3,000 to remove these things, so if you keep one person out of prison for 10 years, that's $600,000 that the state just saved. Plus, that person's working a job and paying taxes.
It's a lot cheaper to keep people out of prison than in prison, and that's the point of the project.