The Whiteley Clinic - A leading Veins Clinic
Welcome to The Whiteley Clinic Veins Clinic website
The Whiteley Clinic is an internationally renowned veins clinic situated in Guildford and London.
It was founded by Mark Whiteley, who was the first person to perform the new endovenous surgery (keyhole surgery for varicose veins) in the UK on 12 March 1999.
Initially, the vascular world ignored this advance and continue to the old practice of stripping veins. Mark Whiteley and his expert vascular technologist, Judy Holdstock, pulled together a team that continued to develop the endovenous minimally invasive or keyhole approach to varicose veins. As they became more successful, The Whiteley Clinic was born.
It is a testament to their vision that despite the initial hostility from the medical profession, it is hard now to move on the Internet without finding adverts for "VNUS Closure or RFiTT (radio-frequency ablation-RFA)", "endovenous laser ablation (EVLA or EVLT)" or a host of other new varicose vein treatments. All of these developments stemmed from the early work into endovenous surgery started by Mark Whiteley in the UK in 1999.
Initially, it was thought that endovenous surgery (keyhole surgery for varicose veins) was:
- less painful than stripping
- small incisions and therefore less likely to get wound infection
- allowed earlier return to work
- gave better cosmetic results
However following prize winning research from The Whiteley Clinic, published in 2007, it was found that the real advantage to endovenous surgery was that the risk of the veins regrowing fell dramatically. After stripping, the same veins are seen to be growing back in 23% people at one year and subsequent research has shown this figure rises to 82% at five years. Endovenous surgery, when performed at the Whiteley clinic using our special protocols, have shown a recurrence rate of the treated vein at five years of 0.1%.
In addition, as the endovenous procedure is now always performed under local anaesthetic, the risk of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and nerve damage has dropped dramatically.
In view of the research and audit is produced by The Whiteley Clinic, there really is no argument for any patient to have general anaesthetic nor stripping surgery. If surgeons all patients do want to have general anaesthetic or stripping, the patients should consent to knowing that they will have inferior results to those produced by endovenous surgery and a higher complication risk.
