Commonly asked questions for a Vein Doctor, Dr. Rajiv Nagesetty.
Dr. Rajiv Nagesetty is a top-rated vein doctor in the East Bay Area and performs more than 1,000 vein procedures each year for patients suffering from varicose and spider veins.
Dr. Nagesetty is one of the founding doctors of Bay Area Surgical Specialists (now BASS Medical Group) and the BASS Vein Center located in Walnut Creek. Dr. Rajiv Nagesetty specializes in vascular surgery, carotid artery disease, stroke prevention, venous insufficiency, and endovascular procedures for peripheral arterial disease (PAD).
Read his full bio here.
Well, a vascular surgeon is a surgeon that specializes in diseases or problems of the arteries and the veins, basically someone that takes care of the circulation. It's different than a cardiologist who is somebody who mainly deals with the heart. A vascular surgeon takes care of all the blood vessels essentially outside of the heart. I personally have been doing it for over 15 years I got into it because my father was a vascular surgeon and I was an engineer when I went to college, and this was a field that was a combination of medicine and engineering. There's a lot of engineering principles in vascular surgery. Now, what does the vascular surgeon do? Well, there are three different facets of vascular surgery. There is what we call pain patient evaluation and imaging. So, we see patients in the office, evaluate them, we do our own testing, and we read all of those tests which are predominantly ultrasounds and then we have two phases of treatment. There's what we call interventional treatment which is essentially what we call percutaneous, or minimally invasive procedures, they are procedures that are essentially done with a needle stick or a poke such as many of the vein procedures that we’re describing today. Then there are actual surgical procedures and those are procedures where there's actually an incision. In addition to that, vascular surgeons follow their patients so many surgeons they'll see someone, they might fix a bone and then they may never see the patient again. But in vascular surgery, many of the patients have conditions that require them to see their surgeon on an ongoing basis. So it is kind of nice to have a relationship with your patients on a long-term basis.
