You may have heard it before. Yoga can treat varicose veins. Where did this come from?
In evaluating this claim, it’s best to recall the source of varicose veins. Let’s start with the fact that blood travels down to your legs as the heart pumps. After all, you need blood in all the areas of your body for those organs to survive.
The next question is how does the blood get back from my legs to my heart? There is no pump in your legs like the heart that will push the blood up. It turns out that the body has developed an ingenious mechanism. The veins are the blood vessels that take blood back to the heart. In your legs the veins travel through the muscles. As you move around, the muscles contract. They massage the veins that travel through them and in this manner act as a pump that pushes the blood up to your heart.
The problem is that when you stop moving and the muscles aren’t contracting the blood should just fall back down. That wouldn’t work very well. So, the body has another ingenious solution. There are one-way valves in the veins in your leg. The muscles contract. They pump the veins. The blood moves up. And the blood can’t move back down your leg because there are one-way valves in your legs that prevent this from happening.
Now, these valves don’t always work properly. Sometimes, the leaflets of the valve don’t close all the way. When this happens some of the blood that the leg muscles pumped upwards, escapes and falls back down your leg. When this happens the blood pools in your leg. Then the leg veins get engorged and expand. And you get varicose veins.
Yoga is a practice where you do various bodily postures. Some of them use your legs. In that case the muscles contract. That will push the blood up your legs. But these postures won’t do anything to repair the valves in your legs. So, when you stop doing the postures, the blood is just going to leak back down to your lower leg. The varicose veins will still be there.
I did a review of the medical literature to see if there are any clinical trials of yoga for treatment of varicose veins. I was able to find one case – that’s right, one case – of yoga treatment for varicose veins. So, there is no medical evidence to support this therapy to restore vein health. And it doesn’t logically make any sense.
I found one vein center that went into great detail about the seven poses that can help your varicose veins. But now you know the real skinny. Yoga is great for your health and well-being. It helps your mental state. But sadly, it won’t do a damned thing for your varicose veins.
Your only answer is to seek medical treatment. That’s why Vanishing Veins is here for you. We’ve treated over 15,000 patients in the almost-twenty years that we’ve been in practice. Along the way, Dr. Lori Greenwald has won many awards and has been featured in the media. Call us today and get something done that really works for your varicose veins. The number is (860)-761-6666.