Foam Sclerotherapy
Some Private Medical Insurance companies are currently
restricting the use of Foam Sclerotherapy.
At The
Whiteley Clinic, we have always restricted the use of Foam
Sclerotherapy to:
- Veins
where no other treatment is likely to be successful (ie:
very small winding veins, veins that are very scarred)
- Veins
small in diameter (research shows excellent 3 year
results from sclerotherapy in veins less than 3 mm
diameter, and good in veins less than 5 mm - but very
poor results over 5 mm diameter)
We do NOT
use foam sclerotherapy in major truncal veins as EVLA or
Radiofrequency ablation have shown excellent closure over
5 years in our hands and these veins are too big diameter
for foam. Therefore true varicose veins can rarely be
effectively treated in the long term by Foam Sclerotherapy
alone - although as an adjunctive procedure to other
treatments such as EVLA it can have excellent results.
Some
insurers have questioned the safety of Foam Sclerotherapy.
Although hundreds of thousands of treatments have taken
place with very low complications at all, one of the
worrying risks is of transient visual disturbance. This is
caused by air bubbles in the foam going to the eye or the
brain through a hole in the heart.
At The
Whiteley Clinic, we reduce such risks by using a mixture
of Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide instead of air. It is the
Nitrogen in the air that causes the problems and so this
mixture reduces the risks to virtually nothing. In
addition, we use very low total doses i very small veins -
avoiding the risk associated with large volumes - seen in
clinics where they try to treat all of the varicose veins
with foam instead of using it with other procedures.
Finally,
some Private Medical Insurers try to avoid covering Foam
by saying it is not approved by NICE. Firstly NICE only
recommends what should be available on the NHS (private
practitioners are allowed to use whatever they know gives
them the results they wish - and they take responsibility
for poor results) - and secondly, the current NICE advice
is certainly not against Foam Sclerotherapy!!!!
To read
the NICE advice for Foam Sclerotherapy for yourself,
please click on the following links:
