Varicose veins are often thought of as being just a cosmetic issue, but they should be viewed as an early marker of failing secondary hearts. When your secondary hearts (the soleus muscles in the calf of the leg) are not working well, the blood in the veins of the legs is not effectively pumped back up to the heart when you are sitting up or standing. Because the veins are very elastic, and the leg skin is also quite elastic, blood is able to pool into the veins over the course of the day. The first evidence that your secondary hearts are not working is the development of spider veins, but these will progress into varicose veins, which can further develop into what is referred to as venous insufficiency.
Venous insufficiency can be a very painful, and even dangerous, condition. At the venous insufficiency stage, the veins have expanded to the point that the valves inside the vein are no longer functional. This means that when the heart relaxes between beats, blood flow in the veins literally comes to a halt. Blood that is not moving rapidly coagulates, and the result is often a venous thrombosis (a clot in the vein). Venous thrombosis can be very painful, but it is also possible for part of the clot to break away and move up into the lungs – this is called a pulmonary embolism, which in some cases can be fatal.
It is therefore essential to begin treatment of varicose veins as soon as they become evident. While there are symptomatic approaches to treating varicose veins, the underlying cause is soleus muscle insufficiency, and so training up your soleus muscles is the most effective long term strategy to both reverse the progression of your varicose veins, and prevent recurrence. HeartPartner has been developed to specifically train up your soleus muscles. Using the HeartPartner daily for one to two hours per day is typically sufficient to eliminate varicose veins over several weeks.