Describing himself light-heartedly as one of the "last of the dinosaurs", Mr Newman has had a long and distinguished career in medicine. He started life as a general surgeon, covering all aspects of gastrointestinal and vascular surgery, but eventually began to turn his focus more and more towards the vascular field. In 1973 he injected his first veins and since then has become one of the leading authorities in the cosmetic treatment of veins in the UK.

"When I started out in general surgery you trained in everything but bit by bit I started to drop certain areas of surgery and really concentrate on the vascular side," he says. "Although I did all forms of vascular surgery, in my private practice most of the patients I was seeing were coming to me because of varicose veins. Then of course you had the patients who were coming to see you because of cosmetic veins."

At the time the main treatment being used for cosmetic veins was sclerotherapy using injections of STD, but one of the side-effects of this, according to Mr Newman, was that you could get staining - known as ‘tea tree’ stains - causing the vein to turn brown.

"The golden rule of surgery should always be if you can’t make someone better don’t make them worse, which is why we inject saline which is safe," he says. "No one ever died from thread veins, so I didn’t want to use treatments that could potentially make them look worse or do any harm. I stopped using sclerosing foam years ago and now only ever use saline when I am injecting."

As he saw increasing numbers of cosmetic patients walking through his door, Mr Newman noticed that while he was getting satisfactory results in the treatment of blue veins with saline injections, he was not getting results when it came to red veins.

"One day a patient came to see me at my Manchester consulting rooms," he remembers. "She had varicose veins as well as typical red and blue thread veins on her legs and it was these she was particularly concerned about getting rid of. I treated her varicose veins with surgery and injected the cosmetic veins, but when she came back four weeks later she was really unhappy – the blue veins had gone, the red veins hadn’t. This really made me sit back and look at cosmetic veins in the legs. It was obvious that you could deal with the blue veins but, in my hands, it simply wasn’t working on the red veins."

It was shortly after this that Mr Newman made the discovery that led to the development of Veinwave. Physicians using the electrolypolysis technique to treat cellulite had noticed that when a certain current was passed through veins, they disappeared. Dr Newman began to investigate how this technology could be adapted to treat red veins on the legs. The technique was first performed in France involving 2,000 sessions on 400 patients. After an 18-month observation period the results were analysed, no complications or incidents were noted and Veinwave was born.

Introduced into the UK in 2001, the treatment uses the process of thermo-coagulation, which involves using microwaves to heat fine blood vessels. The energy is transferred to the affected area via an ultra-fine insulated needle to ensure accurate application without affecting the surrounding skin and tissue. When the high frequency energy (4Mhz) is passed through the vein it causes it to collapse and instantly disappear.

As thermo-coagulation uses a selective controlled energy, which preserves the epidermis, there are no risks of burns or necrosis. One treatment session usually lasts around 10-15 minutes, representing approximately 200-250 pulses, and the results can be seen immediately.

Now used by some of the top vascular clinics in the country, and recently given US Food and Drug Administration approval, the treatment can be used to treat cosmetic veins on any skin type with virtually no downtime.