We would like to welcome you to our first newsletter. We've now been in the region for four and a half years and have benefited from various forms of feedback by different groups of health workers in the community. We hope that this newsletter will serve as a further channel of communication. We are rekindling our efforts to get to know more of the practitioners in Sussex and believe this is particularly important given the current proposed radical changes in health care provision. Update: management of varicose veins.
Endovenous therapy
Traditionally, patients who suffer from superficial venous insufficiency relating to reflux within the saphenous veins have been treated with open surgery which often includes stripping. This is often associated with bruising and requires a few days of convalescence. Endovenous catheter based therapy makes use of Radiofrequency or laser technology to avoid an open procedure. A catheter is inserted into the varicose truncal vein and under strict ultrasound guidance the vein is sealed off completely. This can be done as a local anaesthetic procedure on an outpatient basis. Time off work and anaesthetic risk are minimised. The techniques can be combined with other modalities of treatment such as foam injection and local phlebectomies to optimize the overall result. This is particularly valuable for patients who are not keen on staged treatment or when the saphenous veins are too large for effective foam injection.
