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Surgical curettes designed to remove tissue by scraping the skin. These curettes are typically slender, metal, handheld, manual instruments with an oval or round blade at the distal (straight, curved, or angled) end that is attached to a handle. Skin curettes are used mainly to remove growths (such as warts or basal cell carcinomas) after a biopsy and diagnosis by another means; these devices are less commonly used for diagnosis (i.e., biopsy) because they may produce an inadequate sample (i.e., they break the specimen into pieces), which sometimes precludes microscopic evaluation of structural features that are helpful in diagnosis.
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