Like most problems in life, vein problems present in various shapes and sizes.
Let’s make one thing straight – vein problems are not your fault. Just as you inherited the unique shape of your nose and outgoing personality from your parents, you also inherited their predisposition to have faulty veins.
It’s all in your genes.
You can make them worse by spending a lot of time standing around, but you didn’t cause those veins to bulge or look like little spiders on your skin anymore than you caused your hair to be brown or your eyes to be blue.
Vein abnormalities come in all shapes and sizes so we have learnt to treat them in all sorts of different ways. The basic underlying problem is the same. Veins look abnormal when the blood flowing through them is disrupted, turbulent or slow. This causes them to bulge (varicose veins) look like blue spaghetti just under your skin (reticular veins) or just stand out like thin purple/ blue strands of “spider ” like clusters on your skin (spider telangiectasia) .
Laser treatment (EVLA) is usually reserved for the varicose veins that start high in your groin and extend down to below your knees. We often don’t see the trouble at the skin level and therefore need an ultrasound (Venous Doppler) of your leg veins to better understand what’s going on. The blue veins and the spider veins are usually best treated with Sclerotherapy (this is a fancy word for injecting a very small amount of a sclerosing agent into these veins causing them to get inflamed, close off which redirects the blood into better working veins). Sometimes you might need a combination of laser treatment AND sclerotherapy. In some cases, all that is needed is to make a super small incision and take the vein out. This is called Microphlebectomy.
My job as a vein surgeon is to figure out how much or how little of each of these 3 vein problems you have and tailor the right vein treatment for you.
Legs are to be celebrated. Love your shorts again!
