YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD61lKEmSGw

Transcript for Varicose Vein Treatment and Recovery

Hi, everybody. I’m Dr. Albert Malvehy, at East Bay Vein Specialist, also known as Dr. Vein Eraser. And today I’m going to be talking about vein removal.

So that’s what people come to us for vein removal. In the legs, there are two kinds of veins that we remove. We remove varicose veins, those veins, which are these bulging veins that come from deeper down the circulation. It could be a circulation problem. It can cause real issues for people health wise. And then we also do removal of Spider veins, which are small veins, usually smaller than a millimeter, which are actually within the skin layer themselves.

And these are purely cosmetic. So if these are never taken care of, they don’t usually cause any problems, except we don’t like the way they look. So today I’m going to be talking about varicose veins. If you want to learn more about Spider vein removal, come back another time. I’ll be talking about them for varicose vein removal.

People sort of don’t know what to expect when they come into the office for the first consultation or even when they’re checking out the website or talking to friends about it. It’s usually something that happens in a couple of steps. So people will start with an initial consultation. That consultation is here in the office, usually lasts 20 or 30 minutes for people who have pain or who have injury to their skin. That consultation can be covered by most major health insurance.

For people who don’t like the way they look or people who don’t have insurance that’s in our network, then we have very reasonable out of pocket costs for both the consultation and for treatment. But in any case, this can be covered by insurance for people who have symptoms like pain or cramping or discoloration of swelling, things like that. When people come in for that initial consultation, I am the person that sees them. So we don’t use ultrasound technicians. We don’t have PA and things like that.

Everyone comes in and meets with me directly on the very first visit. And on that visit, in addition to examining the person, taking their history, finding out what kind of treatment they’ve had before, I will do an ultrasound of their leg, or we will actually try and investigate what is the source of these varicose veins so we can come up with a plan of how to treat them. So everybody’s anatomy is a little bit different, and it’s important to customize treatment for that person. So these two people here on the right hand side of this poster, both had the same anatomical defect where they have a vein that you cannot see here in the thigh, where the thigh looks normal. So a vein under the surface of the skin.

This is called the great staff in his vein. And these two people, those two loose, the medical word for that is venous insufficiency the veins, allowing blood to flow backwards down to the floor. When blood flows backwards down to the floor Instead of upwards back up to the heart. The pressure of that is what creates varicose veins. And that’s why veins get worse over time, Because the pressure just continues to build and build and build over the years.

So in terms of treatment, Once we understand what that person’s anatomy is, Then we can target the treatment of both the cause, which is that vein we cannot see and then the varicose veins that we can see at the surface so that we can give the person a durable result that should last for the rest of their life. There are different ways to do vein removal. Older ways of doing them are to surgically remove them. So there’s something called vein stripping, which is done under general anesthesia, Usually in a hospital setting. Person will be put to sleep and the vein will be surgically removed in its entirety.

There are smaller surgical techniques called phlebectomy, where low point aesthetic is used around the bulging veins and a series of incisions are made to remove the veins. I’ve migrated my practice away from those so that for most people, including these two examples here, we can treat these in one visit in the office in 30 minutes, the patient drives themselves here, they drive themselves home and return to normal activity, usually the same day and if not the next day. So what we’ll do is we’ll do something called endo venous laser ablation in the thigh. And that vein that you cannot see, that’s just a fancy medical word means inside the vein we’re going to use a laser to destroy the vein, and we feel pretty comfortable destroying the vein Because we know other healthy veins are doing the work that vein was supposed to be doing since these people were little children.

Then we’ll use a medication injection of foam in the bulging veins to dry those veins up, and then the body will absorb both the laser veins and the dried up veins over the course of about three months. So both of these people had only one treatment. These results are three to six months later because there is an absorption process that happens over that initial three months. For the overwhelming majority of people with one treatment, this is fixed because we fix this root vein, the one that they can’t see.

The bulging veins aren’t going to return because we address the root cause of the problem. So that’s how we do vein removal at East Bay vein specialist, and for most people, they’re pretty darn happy. After coming in for one visit for a consultation, another visit for 30 minutes treatment and then having their varicose veins pretty much cured for life.

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