Thousands of men and women around the world suffer from spider veins on their legs or faces. Spider veins are those tiny little red or purple looking veins that appear on faces and upper thighs and are always asymptomatic and are only a cosmetic concern.
The best treatments for spider veins are using lasers. Laser treatment for spider veins are the easiest, fastest way to remove those unsightly veins. Laser treatments work by using light energy that heats up the blood in the vein, clotting it and then the body reabsorbs the vein. This advanced treatment allows a perfect amount of light energy to each blood vessel.
There are many lasers in use today for the treatment of spider veins. These lasers are most often used with a cooling gel, cooled air, or a variety of other cooling methods. Keeping the skin cool helps reduce discomfort and lowers the risk of injuries to the skin. Before any treatment is done for spider veins, the patient will go through an exam by the doctor to verify that there are no varicose veins. Laser therapy is not effective against the larger varicose veins.
No preparation is needed before having laser therapy for your spider veins, and the procedure takes approximately 10 to 20 minutes in the physician’s office.
During the procedure, only the small superficial spider veins will be treated and no anesthesia is needed. You may feel a slight tickly sensation as the laser fires, but if you are concerned about pain, a topical anesthetic can be applied 20 minutes prior to the procedure.
Treatments can be spaced three to five weeks apart and the veins will begin to disappear about 2 weeks after the initial treatment. The only side effect of having laser treatment for your spider veins is a slightly red ‘cat-scratch’ type appearance at the sight of the treatment however this often disappears within a day or two.
After your treatment, you can go back and resume all your normal daily activities with no problems. Final results may not be seen for many months after the procedure, but you will be able to notice a lightening of the veins shortly after the first treatment.
Once you have had laser treatment for spider veins, you will have to repeat the process every few weeks to completely remove them. These additional treatments are usually spaced evenly over a period of months. Because this is considered a cosmetic procedure, most insurance will not cover the costs.
I agree with you that lasers are ideal for facial spider vein removal because facial have all the characteristics that determine the safe and effective dosage setting for lasers. Unlike leg veins, facial spider veins are usually very similar in size, depth, color, and therefore a single laser setting can be repeated for all the veins.
Although the newer longer-wavelength lasers can be useful for leg spider veins up to 2 mm in diameter, leg spider veins vary in all the characteristics that determine the safe and effective dosage setting for lasers. Laser treatment of leg spider veins requires more treatment sessions, is more painful, and is usually more costly than sclerotherapy. Moreover, leg spider veins are often superficial manifestations of deeper faulty connecting veins, which cannot be accessed by topical lasers. Deeper reticular and perforator veins serve as “feeders” for these veins, and if these are not treated, spider vein treatment alone is doomed to fail. Currently, sclerotherapy is the procedure of choice for leg spider vein treatment.
The greatest utility of lasers in leg spider vein treatment is in a “clean-up’ role following sclerotherapy to ablate veins that are either too resilient to be adequately treated by sclerotherapy or smaller than the diameter of a 30-gauge needle used in sclerotherapy. Combination treatment allows sclerotherapy to treat the larger, feeding venous system, while lasers or IPL effectively seal the superficial thin vessels.