It's one of the most embarrassing conditions, hemorrhoids. In today's Health report, a new treatment with minimal pain.

Hemorrhoids are a very common condition but patients go decades without treatment. They've heard the surgery is excruciatingly painful.

"Hemerroidectomy and that is a surgical removal of both the internal and external hemorrhoid. That is an extremely painful procedure," said Dr. Elsa Goldstein.

According to Dr. Goldstein, a colon rectal surgeon, hemorrhoids are clusters of blood vessels.

"We are born with them and they are normal anatomical structures but we call them hemorrhoids when we have symptoms from them and those symptoms are typically bleeding and protrusion," said Goldstein.

There are two types of hemorrhoids, external and internal. External hemorrhoids often bleed and can be painful while internal hemorrhoids bleed, can prolapse but don't often cause pain.

"Once you have hemorrhoids, you always have them but you may not have symptoms. People will have flare ups and the flare ups will be triggered by something, sitting for long period of time, in planes and cars," the doctor said.

Hemorrhoids are caused by constipation as the result of a low fiber diet.

"People tend to make a library out of their bathroom so they sit on the commode and read magazines and they sit there and strain and that promotes problems with hemorrhoids. Women who are pregnant, patients who do a lot of heavy lifting," Goldstein said.

Many patients get better with a high fiber diet but some require treatment. For internal hemorrhoids, office procedures like a rubber band ligation or infrared coagulation are available. For more serious, larger hemorrhoids, there's a new procedure, called THD, it's taking the place of the traditional, painful hemorrhoidectomy.

"Transanal hemerroidal deartherialization hemorroidapaxy, THD. A Doppler is used to identify the arterial signals that feed the hemorrhoids and they you tie off those arteries that feed the hemorrhoids thereby obliterating the blood supply so that the hemorrhoids shrink, "said Goldstein.

The surgical procedure takes less than an hour and requires some sedation. After the procedure, nearly 80 percent of the patients report no pain and are back to normal activity within three days.

"In the published studies to date has shown there is over a 90 percent success rate from the procedure and then there is a small incident of patients who have some either recurring bleeding or recurrent protrusion," Goldstein said.