Varicose veins are actually abnormal veins lying just beneath the skin of your leg & thigh. These varicose veins are prominently visible, corkscrew like, entangled in one another. It looks as if a number of earthworms or blue-colored spiders are lying under your leg skin. In these veins, the mechanism of carrying impure blood from lower limb back to heart gets deranged either due to defective valves of vein or absence of valves by birth. The function of these valves is to control blood flow in the veins.
Veins are those blood pipes, which collect impure blood from your lower limbs and carry it back to heart and then lung for purification. The job of vein is difficult, as it has to push blood upwards from leg against gravity towards heart. This function of vein is made possible by valves which open up & allow blood to flow only in one direction, but when a person stands up these valves get closed to prevent blood from going down towards feet. In other words, these valves of veins constantly maintain a unidirectional flow of blood that is always towards the heart. When these valves are absent or become defective, these varicose veins fail to control blood flow in one-way direction & in the process they become dilated & swollen under the skin due to high backpressure and this results into pooling of impure blood into the feet.
Dr. K. K. Pandey is a Senior Consultant in Cardiothoracic, Thoracic and Vascular Surgery at Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, New Delhi, with nearly 30 years of surgical experience. He has previously worked at Batra Hospital, Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital in New Delhi and the Bakulev Institute of Cardiovascular Surgery in Moscow. Dr. Pandey specializes in thoracic, lung and chest tumour surgery, varicose veins, vascular bypass procedures and diabetic foot management, using both open and minimally invasive techniques. A surgeon, writer and health educator, he regularly writes columns and books to make complex medical topics easy for the general public, believing that medical knowledge must reach every common person.