Leg Swelling: More Than Water Retention

So it appears I'm doing a little bit of a venous miniseries now, and the question I have to answer is: when is leg swelling not just water retention? What I tell all my patients regularly is that there are thousands and thousands of causes of leg swelling.

In the broadest terms, you've got systemic issues, where you've got problems with the constituents in your body, protein, fluid, that kind of thing. That can cause leg swelling. You can have issues with your heart: your heart's not pumping properly, which can cause back pressure on your legs, and that can cause leg swelling. And then you've got local phenomena, where you have a problem with a joint, or you've injured something, and that can cause swelling.

But one of the causes that is often not talked about is what I have tried to explain over the last few days, and that's venous reflux. Venous reflux, as we've talked about, is when the valves in your vein system aren't working properly, and what that does is cause back pressure. I've described…