Is endovenous surgery painful? Does endovenous surgery hurt?

It really depends on exactly which vein operations you are having. The first thing to say is that they are all undertaken using local anaesthetic. You should never have general anaesthetic for any vein procedure. It is much safer under local anaesthetic and less expensive as you don’t need to stay in hospital or have a general anaesthetic. Additionally, you will not get a deep vein thrombosis, or nerve damage (though this is very rare).

A problem with local anaesthetic procedures is that you do have to have an injection of the local anaesthetic and then the procedure injections on top. However, this is much less painful than the old stripping operation. So when we compare the stripping operation with these new procedures, such as endovenous laser or radio frequency, then of course people realise what a fantastic advantage these new procedures provide.

As we slowly move away from stripping, and now really nobody should ever have stripping of course, people forget how painful that was. There is some discomfort when you have the new procedures because you feel the injection of the local anaesthetic, but considering the operation that we are actually doing, destroying the big vein, it is remarkably pain free compared to what we used to have to do with the old technique of stripping.