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Comment by RealityVoid | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, what is wrong with the veins in your legs, more exactly? My dad, 68, has periphery artery disease and, well, it sucks.

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There's something like 6 one way valves that let your heart pump the blood out of your leg a little bit at a time. When they wear out, there's not enough pumping action at times to replace the blood as often as necessary. (also, the veins aren't rated for the pressure, which is why they blow out, and you get varicose or spider veins.)

But there are alternate paths for the blood to flow. If you mangle the larger deep veins, the blood will still circulate out secondary paths. And literally the next day, my foot was pink, and I wasn't winded climbing the stairs, and my legs weren't lead weights by the end of the day.

> There's something like 6 one way valves that let your heart pump the blood out of your leg a little bit at a time. When they wear out, there's not enough pumping action at times to replace the blood as often as necessary.

Shouldn't we be able to replace them with man-made ones as they fail, like already it's possible to do with heart valves[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_heart_valve

Quite possibly. The procedure they performed on me is already in at least the 3rd major iteration. Originally they'd replace the vein with cadaver veins...then they used wires to...ahem...catch and rip out the old vein.

They used a catheter on me using RF to ablate the vein so it would no longer flow blood. Recovery was quick. (Wear support stockings for a week, you can move around as normal the next day...don't run a marathon or lift weights.)

It was _very_ low impact.

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