How Vein Treatments Work

Posted: Friday, February 28, 2014 | Revised: March 5, 2014

Vein treatments provide relief from the discomfort and embarrassment of varicose veins and spider veins. Venous surgeons perform minimally invasive procedures to reduce the appearance of spider and varicose veins by addressing the root cause of these unsightly blue bulges – blood pooling in a vein.

During the course of one day, your heart beats about 100,000 times to circulate six quarts of blood around your body. In that single day, your blood travels about 12,000 miles through large blood vessels and small capillaries that run from the heart to the lungs then to the rest of the body before returning to the heart. This blood delivers fresh oxygen to body cells and takes away toxic waste products.

Delivering oxygen-rich blood to the feet is relatively easy – gravity helps pulls blood flow down into your legs and feet. Moving the blood against gravity from your feet back up to your heart, however, is much more difficult as blood tends to flow backwards between each heartbeat. This causes blood to pool inside veins in your lower extremities, especially in your calves and feet.

Special valves in your veins prevent blood from flowing backwards by opening when the heart pumps blood and closing in between beats. These valves can wear out or suffer damage. When that happens, the valves do a poor job of opening or closing. This allows blood to flow backwards between heartbeats, or become trapped in a portion of vein.

As it accumulates inside the vein, trapped blood presses against vein walls. Continuous pressure from an ever-increasing amount of blood causes veins to enlarge and become bloated. This eventually causes veins to become large and purple – the hallmarks of varicose veins. Blood trapped in tiny capillaries causes spider veins to appear. Begin vein treatment as soon as varicose and spider veins appear.

Blood accumulating in varicose or spider veins cannot pick up oxygen from the lungs or carry away toxins, so the body cells served by those spider or varicose veins suffer from low oxygen and high toxin levels. As a result, lower extremity tissue immediately surrounding the varicose vein begins to break down. Without treatment from a Michigan vein doctor or other qualified vascular surgeons, you may develop dark skin or even broken skin, known as venous skin ulcers, on your ankles or feet.