How Varicose Vein Treatment Can Improve Quality of Life

Modern day varicose vein treatment, like ultrasound guided EVLT and foamed sclerotherapy, can dramatically improve one’s quality of life. However, the average person may never discover this when trying to decipher scientific papers on the subject! It can seem these papers are written in some kind of secret code. Scientists have their own jargon and their own way of doing things so they can produce quantitative numbers that can be run through statistical programs. However, these methods, or even the stats they produce, may not be the best way for non-scientists to understand how varicose vein treatment can improve their life.

When measuring the effectiveness of varicose vein treatment on the quality of life, scientists also throw in a lot of acronyms like the CIVIQ, AVVQ, and VEINES-QOL to measure QOL. In case you’re wondering, that’s the Chronic Venous Insufficiency Questionnaire, the Aberdeen Varicose Vein Questionnaire, and the VEnous INsufficiency Epidemiological and Economic Study all widely used to measure the quality of life before and after varicose vein treatment.

These scientific methods are accepted in the research community as the best way to access the effectiveness of different types of varicose vein treatment on the quality of life of individuals with different stages of varicose vein disease. However, the vein doctors and their staff who work in varicose vein treatment clinics, who see firsthand the emotional, mental, and physical differences in their patients before and after treatment, just may have a better “intuitive feel” for the effectiveness of varicose vein treatment than the research scientists and acronym-named tests!

Let’s take a few real world examples, rather than these rather dry scientific data points, to explain how varicose vein treatment can dramatically improve your quality of life.

Example #1:

You and your husband have always dreamed of traveling the world when you retire. You want to experience the Eiffel Tower sparkling at sunset, hear the soundscape of a Peruvian rain forest, see the “March of the Penguins” in person, and take an elephant safari in Africa! However, in the last several years your legs, ankles, and feet puff up with fluid when you even try to walk the nature trail at your local park. You’re not sure your body can handle even one of these magnificent trips you and your husband have dreamed about, let alone all of them.

You likely have venous reflux and varicose vein treatment like sclerotherapy or laser treatment could dramatically improve your edema issues. How’s that for an improvement in your quality of life!?

Example #2:

Your grandson loves soccer and he wants you to teach him your famous moves! You try to hit the soccer field with him but your legs sting and burn from your varicose veins. You try to grimace and bear it. You don’t want to ruin your grandson’s fun. You also want to be there for him. You even try to get him interested in less physical activities but he’s persistent. “Soccer grandpa soccer!”

Men can benefit just as much as women from varicose vein treatment. Get checked out and live your life to the fullest. After your treatment, and a couple of weeks of recovery time, you can start creating soccer memories your grandson will never forget.

Example #3:

When you were in your late thirties, you learned to play tennis. You joined a club, met some wonderful people who have now become some of your closest friends. You used to love playing doubles matches on the weekends but now you actually dread it. Your legs feel heavy and achy and you just don’t have the will to chase down that yellow ball. You spend two days recovering from a single match. It’s gotten to where you actually make up excuses to get out of playing because you’re too embarrassed to explain the real reason why you don’t want to play tennis anymore.

Here’s the good news. Many people feel years, even decades, younger, after varicose vein treatment. They feel far more spritely than they’ve felt in a long time and often become more physically active than they were before treatment.

We could quite literally give thousands of other examples where one’s quality of life dramatically improves after varicose vein treatment!

If you would like to attempt to read a thorough review of the scientific literature on quality of life assessment of those afflicted with varicose veins, go here: http://www.rees-france.com/en/IMG/pdf/3_Publie.pdf. It was published in the Journal of Vascular Surgery Venous and Lymphatic Disorders in 2015. Warning: this review is full of acronyms and other scientific jargon and it will take you a while to wade through the twelve pages (including five pages of references).

You can take a print out of this paper with you to read in the waiting room at Metro Vein Centers when you get your free evaluation to determine if you would benefit from varicose vein treatment… ha ha, we’re just kidding! There are far more fascinating magazines to read in Metro Vein Centers’ waiting rooms!

Seriously, if you want to see how varicose vein treatment might improve your quality of life, the first step is to access whether or not you have a medical need for treatment, and if so, how advanced your varicose vein disease may be. For example, do you have venous reflux? If so, how bad is the condition and how fast might this condition worsen? What type of treatment would be best to fix your varicose vein problems. These are the types of questions you’ll have answered at your evaluation with Metro Vein Centers.