How many times a week do you experience leg pain or swelling? If you find yourself sitting around thinking “My legs hurt” often – more than once or twice a week – then you really should contact the best leg pain doctors in Sun City and get an ultrasound checkup.
There are many possible causes of chronic leg pain and swollen, achy legs, and it’s important to determine what’s causing you to experience these symptoms. Some of these causes are transitory, and the pain can go away naturally. But if it doesn’t go away, the cause of the pain may be vascular in nature.
If you have varicose veins that you can see, they may be the cause of the pain and swelling. A vein exam that takes less than an hour to complete can tell you how serious they are, and whether they require treatment.
But there are other types of vascular disorders that cause leg pain and swelling, and some of them are very serious, and in some cases, potentially fatal. That’s why the best Sun City vein specialists recommend that you get an ultrasound exam if you regularly experience leg pain. In this article, we’ll present several reasons why we recommend this.
First, not all varicose veins or vascular problems are visible
The only varicose veins you can see on your legs are the ones that are superficial, meaning that they are close to the surface of the skin. You won’t be able to see deeper varicose veins, even large ones, if they are deeper, covered by layers of fatty tissue and muscle. But even non-visible varicose veins can cause leg pain and swelling. An ultrasound exam can detect these “hidden” varicose veins and determine how serious they are and how to best treat them.
This is especially true if your vascular specialists use “gold standard” Doppler ultrasound. This advanced technology allows your doctors to visualize the veins beneath the skin. What’s more, they can also see the blood flowing through the veins. Doppler ultrasound enables us to easily detect signs of chronic venous insufficiency (CVI). CVI is a condition that disrupts circulation and causes blood to “pool” in the veins, causing them to swell.
Ultrasound exams are painless, and can determine within just a few minutes whether you have varicose veins or not. It can detect even the ones that aren’t visible. More important, ultrasound allows us to determine how serious the varicose veins are. Then we can recommend the right treatment options.
Second, it’s not just varicose veins that can be invisible to the naked eye
If you’re experiencing leg pain and swelling, one of the other problems that might be causing these symptoms is deep vein thrombosis, or DVT. This condition is caused when blood clots form in the deep veins of the leg. DVT is much more serious than varicose veins. If one of these blood clots breaks loose and travels through the veins to your lungs, it can cause a pulmonary embolism (PE).
60,000 to 100,000 Americans die every year from DVT/PE, so one of the first things we as leg pain doctors in Sun City do during an ultrasound exam is to scan for blood clots. If we find them, we can recommend treatment. But even if we don’t, once DVT is excluded as a potential cause of your leg pain, we can check for venous insufficiency and make treatment recommendations for that if we detect it.
Third, these conditions are treatable, but only if you know about them
The most important reason you should give us a call at Comprehensive Integrated Care and schedule an ultrasound checkup is that neither varicose veins nor DVT “get better on their own.” Most of the time, in fact, they get worse.
The sooner you find out what’s causing your leg pain and swollen, achy legs, the sooner you can seek vein disease treatment near you and make the pain go away. Modern vein disease treatment is fast, painless, and minimally invasive. Treatments usually don’t take more than an hour to complete, and they can be performed in the comfort of our CiC offices. The treatments require almost no “recovery time” because they are so gentle there is nothing to recover from.
Best of all, modern vein disease treatment works. Whatever the nature of your vascular disorder, CiC circulation experts can recommend treatments that eliminate your symptoms and get you back on your feet quickly, no longer bothered by constant leg pain and swelling. Even better, if your pain is caused by varicose veins, we can eliminate them, too. Imagine not having to see those ugly, swollen veins in your mirror ever again.
So we urge you to give our experts a call at 888-377-7122 or go online to schedule an appointment. The best vascular specialists in Sun City are waiting to help you.