I've had this or a similar condition for about 16 years now. A couple years ago I went to the Mayo Clinic. They tried some anti-fungal/steroid creams and medications, then I tried Tretinoin cream, all with not much success. From the start, the doctor told me that laser surgery could be a possibility but he wanted to try all other options first.

Well, about 11 weeks ago I had the CO2 laser surgery done at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. In summary, it doesn't appear that the surgery worked and at the current time, the condition seems to be worse. This could be because it's still healing from the surgery, but the doctor confirmed that it doesn't appear to have worked. His thought was that my condition is deeper than the outer layer of skin (laser surgery removes all the outer layers of lip skin) and therefore didn't kill the disease.

He has come up with another potential diagnosis - chelitis glandularis. Right now, he's got me on oral steroids, a strong steroid cream, and I'm doing vinegar soaks each day. I have another apt in a couple weeks and he said that if the oral steroids helped, he wanted to do steroid injections directly into the lips. He also mentioned doing a deep tissue biopsy, but I'm not so sure I'm going to do that (I've already had a deep biopsy a long time ago, and two punch biopsies in recent years).

Has anybody else done steroid injections? Or heard of this other potential diagnosis?