Varicose Veins – Surgery

Transcript

“In the past. Once again, things are changing quite quickly in this field. In the past, the surgical therapy, what this problem was called vein stripping. And we use a plastic device called a stripper. And what we do, this is just a plastic filament, to which you can attach a plastic head. And what you do is you make a little cut at the vein right below the knee, and you expose the little vein and make a cut in the vein and advance this plastic device all the way up to the groin. And you make a second incision in the groin to expose the vein again. And you exit that cut through that vein, you attach the head and then just by brutal force to just strip it out from there, going through the knee and you just rip out that vein. What are you doing there?

The assumption is you have, like I told you, thousands of veins in your legs and that main vein, let’s say the great saphenous vein, is acting up is not working well. So what you do is you are not allowing that blood to return to the heart, to that faulty channel, you are removing it out of the context. So that blood is now pushed to go to a healthier channel, closer to the vein, to the deep veins into your heart. And so now that blood has used to stay there and that bad vein actually is no longer there. Returning to your heart faster. And so that pressure in your veins diminishes the pain, diminishes the swelling, diminishes, and everything gets better. That used to be therapy up to 30 years ago, 20 years ago, surgery called vein stripping.”