My name is Jamie Turner and when I turned 22, I started to form a horrible case of acne. I used every cleanser and lotion I could find and I even asked my physician for a topical steroid cream to clear up the zits on my face. After six months of treatment, my physician completed a blood test that concluded that a hormone imbalance was causing my acne. I started on therapy to control the amount of estrogen my body produced. The therapy along with a good diet and exercise regimen helped to clear up my acne. I am sharing my story, because acne is not just a condition that affects teenagers. It can affect adults at any age, and it can cause a great deal of embarrassment. Don't let your acne go untreated. Read my blog instead and learn about both natural and medical treatments that can help you.
While the idea of doctors and nurses using lasers in their procedures might sound futuristic, they have become a very versatile surgical tool. By using a very focused beam of light, lasers can cut through tissue and sterilize it at the same time; if you've ever been sunburned or put your hand close to an incandescent light bulb and felt the heat radiating from it, you have a sense of how this works.
For surgery, of course, the light is used in a much more controlled manner. There are two main ways that lasers are used in varicose vein treatment: surface laser treatment and endovenous laser therapy.
What's The Difference Between Surface Laser Treatment and Endovenous Laser Therapy?
SLT for Surface and Spider Veins – Although it is sometimes called laser surgery, surface laser treatment is a completely noninvasive procedure – no cuts or incisions are made into the skin at all. Instead, an external laser is pointed through the skin at varicose veins near the surface.
The laser's wavelength is calibrated to damage the veins – causing scarring that seals them off – with no or minimal damage to the skin; this works best with pale skin and dark veins for maximum contrast, but newer lasers with longer wavelengths can also be used on darker skin.
Because the laser needs to penetrate the skin down to the veins, surface laser treatment is reserved for smaller and shallower veins such as spider veins. If you have problems in a larger vein, endovenous laser therapy can be used instead.
ELT for Deeper Veins – Endovenous laser therapy, also known as laser ablation, is a minimally invasive procedure – under local anesthesia, a small cut or puncture is made in the skin and a laser fiber is threaded into the damaged vein. The fiber is then slowly pulled back out while emitting laser light, damaging and sealing the vein all along its length.
Some older varicose surgeries removed the vein itself; the downside was the need for larger cuts that could lead to scarring. In ELT, while the vein is not removed, the body will reabsorb the vein over time; the tiny insertion point for the fiber should cause no permanent scarring.
Using Them Together – Sometimes, you may have a deeper varicose vein that is feeding into spider veins on the surface. In this case, these laser therapies can be used in conjunction – an endovenous laser to seal off the feeder vein followed by surface laser treatments for any spider veins that do not fade when the larger vein is sealed.
In a sense, perhaps laser surgery is futuristic – but who wouldn't want a future where surgery requires less cutting and scarring, carries a lower risk of complications, and lets you get back to your life faster? Luckily, it's not a future you have to wait for – the option is here now.
For more information, check out websites such as http://veinvarices.com.
Share11 February 2015
