Introduction:

various surgical methods have been described for partial excision of the fimatous skin among which is the use of high frequency electrosurgery.

Objective:

to describe the basic principles of electrosurgery in the treatment of rhinophyma.

Methods:

a bibliographic review was carried out in four digital databases Medline, Ebsco, PubMed, Scielo, between February and May 2020. Thesaurus was used in Spanish as rinofima, electrocirugía, electrocoagulación; equipo; electricidad and its counterpart in English. The search revealed 70 articles, of these only 40 met the inclusion criteria.

Develoment:

85% of the articles belong to studies of rhinophyma and only 25% of the investigations refer to the principles of the use of electrosurgery, being 70% of these, articles not related to disease. The principles of the use of high frequency electrosurgery, its advantages, disadvantages as well as the care during its use were described. When analyzing the behavior of the articles according to their representativeness in the scientific journals, we found that Dermatologic Surgery was the one that contributed the most articles to the review.

Conclusions:

the use of high frequency electrosurgery in the treatment of rhinophyma is widely used in the literature, but most of the authors mention it among the treatments used or show their results. The principles of operation of high frequency electrosurgery are explained as well as its advantages and disadvantages.

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