29th January 2014 in by Sarah Husband When our immunity gets lower, we become more exposed to a series of health conditions, and most of the times we blame our diet or inadequate rest schedule for our immunity problems. If we wake up with a sore throat or suffer from frequent episodes of cold or flu, we blame the weather or the lack of vitamins from our diet, when in fact these problems, just like the excessive fluid retention that causes swelling and pain of the feet and ankles, might be caused by the blockage of lymph nodes. How the lymphatic system works These small, bean-shaped glands are spread throughout the body and are connected by lymph vessels, forming the lymphatic system. The main role of this system is to protect the body against ailments, as part of the immune system, and to transport the lymph, just like the cardiovascular system carries the blood. Here’s how the lymphatic system works: as blood circulates throughout the body, it leaks out from the blood vessels into the tissues, providing the cells with nutrients and transporting toxins as well. From tissues, the leaked fluid drains into the lymph vessels, which transport the liquid to the lymph nodes. Here, lymph is filtered and white cells kill all viruses and bacteria found in lymph, then the cleared lymph is emptied back into the bloodstream.
The lymphatic system works continuously, but unlike the cardiovascular one, it has no pump to push the fluid faster through the vessels, or to ensure a proper lymph circulation. Still, it’s not composed only of nodes and vessels – the spleen, thymus, tonsils and adenoids are also parts of the lymphatic system, each of them having their role in draining the lymph and removing bacteria and toxins from the body. Back to lymph nodes: these are located in several regions, some of them being closer to the skin’s surface – nodes in armpits, groin and neck area, while some are found in the chest, abdomen and pelvis regions. Nodes look like tiny olives, and can’t be felt with your hands, except for those located in the armpits, neck and groin area, which can be easily identified when they get swollen. What causes lymph nodes to swell?
Nodes get swollen when there’s an injury, an infection or a tumor growing near the lymph node’s location. The swelling is caused by an excessive production of infection-fighting white blood cells, as a response to the presence of the pathogens, or by the accumulation of toxins. Certain medicines can also lead to swollen lymph nodes, other potential triggers for this condition being mononucleosis (infection caused by the Epstein-Barr virus), AIDS and syphilis. When the nodes remain obstructed for longer periods, they can lead to lymphedema, condition which requires medical intervention. Symptoms of lymphedema include swelling of the arms, fingers, legs, chest or shoulders, a sensation of heaviness, skin tightness, decreased flexibility in the affected area and tight fitting watches, bracelets or clothes.
Getting adequate treatment for this condition is crucial, as left untreated lymphedema can prevent oxygen from reaching the tissues, and can seriously alter the body’s immune function and healing ability. Lymphatic drainage massage is perhaps the best thing you can do to help yourself until you see your doctor, and it’s a form of self-therapy you should receive regularly for a proper functioning of the lymphatic system. Lymphatic drainage massage Although manual massage performed by a specialist is the best, you can still benefit from this form of massage at home, either by learning the technique or by stepping on your whole body vibration machine and allowing it to enhance the circulation of lymph throughout your body. You can read more on how WBV helps with lymphatic drainage.
As for manual massage, it’s been proven to help increasing the lymph flow by up to 20 times, so it’s definitely a technique that can boost your immunity, helping the body fight against pathogens and flush out toxins more efficiently. Moreover, lymphatic drainage massage can speed up the recovery from various ailments, and can increase your energy levels by ensuring a healthier delivery of nutrients to cells and a cleaner blood composition. Since some of the lymph nodes are located near the skin’s surface, it’s important not to apply too much pressure when massaging the swollen areas. Movements should be gentle, to help moving the lymph along the body in specific directions, and drain out the fluids from tissues. Although very helpful in relieving numerous ailments, lymphatic drainage massage is not only for ill people.
Anyone who wants to get rid of puffy and swollen tissues, to improve their immune function, aid in the removal of toxins, reduce the appearance of cellulite, prevent skin redness, spider veins and acne, or simply encourage the lymph blow in the body, for an overall improved health state, should receive this form of massage regularly. Share your thoughts on this topic with!
I am a science writer and a former Registered Massage Therapist with a decade of experience treating tough pain cases. I was the Assistant Editor of for several years. I’ve written hundreds of articles and several books, and I’m known for readable but heavily referenced analysis, with a touch of sass. I am a runner and player. Many massage therapists believe that “toxins” are “flushed” into the bloodstream by massage and then washed away by drinking extra water after you get off the table. Exactly which toxins and how they are “flushed” by massage or washed away by water is completely unclear to anyone. Many therapists know it’s all rather vague but apply the: drinking water certainly won’t hurt, right?
No, probably not (although unnecessary worries about dehydration and over-hydrating are biggers problems than most people realize). It’s polite and pleasant to offer post-massage water, but there’s no biological, detoxifying need for it. It’s about on par with a recommendation to “think positively” or “go for a short walk to get your blood moving” — fine things, but tepid medical advice. How many massage therapists are still out there telling their clients that massage gets rid of toxins in the body? On any given day on Facebook, I see about half dozen people at least making that claim Would you maaahnd sharing with us exactly how that happens? — Which toxins are these, exactly? There are real “toxins” and some legitimate “detoxification” treatments.
But casual and careless use of these terms is almost always a red flag, and a strong theme in all the bizarre and medically illiterate “.” It is accompanied by a more or less perfect ignorance of which toxins. Are we talking about lead poisoning here? What chemicals?
Dihydrogen monoxide? Magnesium sulfate? The toxin-talkers do not know. Or, worse, they think they know — but give examples that are mythical, and/or absurdly extreme.
The body deals with undesirable molecules in many ways. It eliminates some and recycles others; some are trapped in a safe place; and quite a few can’t be safely handled at all (metals). Most alleged “detox” treatments are focused on stimulating an excretion pathway, like sweating in a sauna.
Download pain coping strategies questionnaire pdf free. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 21, pp. Abstract-MEDLINE| Abstract-PsycINFO| Abstract-EMBASE| $Order Document Freud, S, (1966). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (pp. In J Strachey (Ed), (1966). Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defense.
But it’s not like sweating is broken and the sauna is fixing it! The only truly “detoxifying” treatments help the body eliminate or disarm molecules the body cannot process on its own. A stomach pump for someone with alcohol poisoning is literally “detoxifying.” So are antivenoms and chelation for heavy metals. When massage therapists talk (or think) about detoxifying, they need to be much more specific: what molecule, how it normally works, and how massage or water intake supposedly improves the speed or effectiveness of normal biological waste processing (recycling, sequestering, or elimination).
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Metabolically speaking When pressed to be specific, most therapists will say “metabolic wastes” — chemical products of cellular activity — and never specify any exogenous toxin or poison that is remotely realistic as a target for “flushing” with massage or water. Metabolic wastes are much closer to the truth.
The rest of the article will stick to the idea that the only “toxins” relevant to massage are waste metabolites. It’s also a really broad category, and it does not actually explain much, or narrow things down. Cellular chemistry produces a lot of molecules. And it’s not really nice to call them wastes — it’s a bit of a slur, a chemical prejudice based in ignorance.
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In fact, many of them are not really “wastes” at all Beautiful chemical you As in the rest of nature, not much in cellular chemistry is wasted. Chemicals are re-used and re-cycled. There are many (many, many, many) of them, and they all go through complex pathways, many never even see the bloodstream (they hang out only in cells and between cells), and many are probably completely unaffected by any fluid balance issue (short of dying of thirst, which affects pretty much everything).
Indeed, most metabolic “wastes” actually have utility throughout a cascade of functional interactions. You literally don’t want to “get rid of” them.
You want them to go through their normal chemical lifecycle, processed and re-processed. Trying to flush them out would be sort of like trying to improve a car engine by getting rid of the exhaust before it hits the turbocharger. Metabolic by-products are not just nasty chemicals pooped out by cells that just hang around, stuck in tissue, waiting for your friendly neighbourhood massage therapist to come along and flush them away.
There certainly is a class of molecules loosely described as “metabolic wastes,” but it’s unfair to paint them all with the same brush, assuming that they are harmful or toxic. In many cases, it would actually be harmful to flush them, if you could — because they are a critical part of beautiful chemical you! Flushing: how could massage “release” toxins, anyway? It’s clear that we still don’t have a fix on which toxins therapists are talking about. Let’s work with an example of a rock-star-popular waste metabolite: lactic acid, or lactate.
Lactic acid is the poster boy for the waste metabolites, probably the only one that’s a household name, and most massage therapists still assume that lactic acid can be squished out of muscle tissue and into the bloodstream. This is not a difficult thing to test, and it has been tested, and some results were a bit shocking: not only does massage definitely not “reduce” lactic acid, perhaps massage even “ impairs lactic acid and hydrogen ion removal from muscle.” Whoops. This is not really surprising.
If people needed massage to help them “clear” lactic acid, sprinters would drop like flies without emergency massage after every race. The effect must be minor or non-existent. In any case, it’s worth emphasizing that lactic acid is not the cause of muscle pain at any time except the immediate aftermath of intense exercise, and probably not even then. Recent (2008-2010) research has shown that muscle fatigue and the “burn” that you feel as you exercise intensely is probably caused by calcium physiology, not an accumulation of lactic acid. In particular, lactic acid does not cause soreness the day after exercise — it’s long gone by then. And there’s more: lactic acid is actually a useful molecule with a productive metabolic fate, not a dead-end waste product.
Lactate as a “bad” molecule is one of the most persistent silly myths in all of exercise science. So presenting lactic acid as some kind of metabolic bogeyman that massage can get rid of is wrong, wrong, wrong on many levels. And any other metabolic waste is even less likely to fit the bill. So this is another nail in the coffin of the silly notion that massage somehow “detoxifies.” Now it’s time for a plot twist.
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Oh, irony: poisoned by massage! Massage is toxic? But so is good scotch.
And hard exercise. Not only is massage not a detoxification treatment in any sense, it is actually the opposite: a toxifying treatment.
A little bit. Post-massage soreness and malaise ( PMSM) is a common phenomenon after any strong massage. It is probably caused by mild rhabdomyolysis (“rhabdo”), a form of poisoning.
True rhabdo is a medical emergency in which the kidneys are poisoned by myoglobin from muscle crush injuries. However, many physical and metabolic stresses cause milder rhabdo-like states — even just intense exercise, and probably massage as well. This is substantiated by a case study of acute rhabdomyolysis caused by intense massage, by many well-documented cases of exertional or “white collar” rhabdo, and by the strong similarity between PMSM and ordinary exercise soreness. A rhabdo cocktail of waste metabolites and by-products of tissue damage is probably why we feel a bit cruddy after biological stresses and traumas — even massage, sometimes. It’s not that big a deal.
Massage is still worthwhile. But it is, technically, a little bit toxifying — not detoxifying. Nor can massage get rid of any rhabdo it causes. You can’t “flush” the rhabdo cocktail away with massage, or drinking a little extra water — or any amount of water. PMSM is just an unavoidable mild side effect of strong massage, just like soreness after intense exercise. I have, which explains exactly why it can’t be “flushed.” The rest of this article explains the futility of flushing in more general terms.
Rather than being DE-toxifying, deep tissue massage can probably cause a slightly toxic situation in the body 5,000 words And how is water supposed to help anyway? Even if there are problematic waste metabolites in your tissues, and even if they can be mostly liberated into the bloodstream why would drinking a couple extra glasses of water help get rid of them? There’s a prevalent and vague belief that drinking water somehow “rinses” your blood vessels or cells or something. But your circulatory system is not a simple system of tubes that you can flush out by imbibing extra water.
This makes about as much sense as adding fuel to a car to make it go faster. In fact, fluid balance is quite stable and somewhat independent of modest changes in water intake. Drink some extra, drink some less — your blood volume will stay almost exactly the same. Your body is an “,” but the total amount of water in circulation — in your blood and between your cells — remains nice and steady. You only need so much of the stuff. Just like your respiratory system excels at maintaining constant levels of oxygen and blood acidity, your guts cleverly keep your insides just the right amount of wet. Drinking more water than you need doesn’t add it to your bloodstream — you just piss away the extra!
The liver and the kidneys are the primary detoxifying organs: this is where most junky molecules are transformed, disarmed, and/or excreted. And they don’t require extra water to work any more than they need extra food to work. Their elaborate chemistry marches on unperturbed, whether you drink 4 glasses of water per day or 12. If you are significantly dehydrated, of course you would certainly start to have problems — but liver and kidney failure are not among the early consequences! The many fates of metabolites Carbon dioxide is a prevalent waste metabolite, and an easy one to understand: your cells produce it via combustion of fuels with oxygen, like a trillion teensy car engines.
It may be found at high levels in myofascial trigger points (muscle knots), indicating that they are metabolically “revving.” To hammer home that this stuff really is a “toxin,” CO2 is also chemically equivalent to acidity: to be CO2-polluted is to be acidic! But CO2 disposal just has nothing to do with water, nothing at all. Its fate is completely separate from fluid balance. Carbon dioxide is processed at extreme speeds — quite “aggressively,” because we cannot tolerate much variation in acidity — primarily by a chemical pathway through the bloodstream and lungs: a pathway that does not much involve the kidneys, fluid balance, or fluid excretion.
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And the amount of CO2 involved in trigger point toxicity is a drop in an ocean of chemistry anyway. Even if massage squished a trigger point’s full cargo of CO2 into the bloodstream, that’s an infinitesimally small amount of CO2 compared to the total CO2 produced in a single second by all of the body’s cells. We produce and process vast quantities of CO2 constantly, and we do it effortlessly. So much for that prominent toxin being flushed away by water! And so it is with all the other “toxins” in a trigger point — problematic when concentrated in a patch, they are otherwise trivial and unaffected by water intake in any case.
Even supposing that squishing a trigger point magically forces every molecule of every pain-causing metabolite into the bloodstream (not just into adjacent intercellular fluids, which is actually more likely), they still wouldn’t require further “flushing” by any means. Once in the bloodstream, they would be lost like motes in a sandstorm, joining billions of their metabolic siblings that are routinely produced — and processed — by all the cells of the body, and drinking water has no relevance to those processes. A hydration detour: do you need to hydrate in general? Last year I stumbled across some evidence that surprisingly mild dehydration can make you a bit pissy and foggy which turned out to be funded in part by a giant corporation that sells bottled water!
Pretty fishy, right? Conflicts of interest aren’t always deal-breakers, but that one is highly suspicious. And that’s just the tip of an iceberg. There’s much more to read about water and dubious industry-funded science. From “”: much of the science surrounding exercise and hydration has been underwritten by Gatorade, which obviously has an interest in pushing the notion of dehydration as a performance killer and hydration as the silver bullet. (In their book The Runner’s Body, Tucker and co-author Jonathan Douglas mention one fear-mongering study that suggests that “dehydration of 2 percent causes performance to decline by up to 20 percent.”) The whole thing is terribly damning and makes you wonder if any good science about hydration has ever actually been done. Read it all: it’s quite good, albeit depressing.
Or just read the title of this letter to a journal, which pretty much sums it up: What about “lymphatic drainage”? Isn’t that a clear example of detoxifying massage? This comes up in most Facebook debates between massage therapists on this topic.
It’s a red herring. Manual lymphatic drainage (MLD) is a fairly exotic and specialized manual technique for reducing swelling. Although it is performed with the hands and a natural fit for massage therapists to learn, it is not “massage” per se, and the effect is mostly absent from all other kinds of massage. It has a reputation for impressive, visible effects on swelling — which have been totally absent from some well-controlled tests, or (at best) quite a bit less impressive than its reputation would suggest. In principle, MLD supposedly stimulates/exaggerates the normal action of the lymphatic system, the primary function of which is not waste disposal but the removal of excess tissue fluids, and then the filtration of lymph through nodules of immune cells (lymph nodes). Lymph nodes are really not at all like the liver, which actually is a “waste processing plant.” The liver is the organ that processes junk in your blood. Lymph nodes are about catching invaders, foreign microbes, which makes them more like “security check points.” You can see from this difference that it’s not really correct to say that lymphatic drainage is about “waste removal,” even if there are some cellular waste products in lymph (and there probably are).
Elephantiasis This is what happens when lymph doesn’t flow — swelling & lots of it. Not “toxicity.” It is easy to find many gruesome pictures of elphantiasis on the internet.
If lymph were critical for waste removal, then the major impact of failure of lymphatic drainage would be tissue pollution. But failures of lymphatic drainage — for instance, drainage can fail because of surgical damage to lymph vessels and nodes, and indeed that is why MLD exists as a therapy — do not result in tissue “toxicity” at all, but severe swelling (elephantiasis, in the most extreme cases). It’s super unpleasant, but it’s not an issue of toxicity. So MLD isn’t really “massage” as we normally know it, and doesn’t “release toxins/wastes” in any case: that’s a gross misrepresentation of the physiology as I understand it, and cannot be used as an example of detoxifying massage even if it weren’t for the evidence that it doesn’t work as advertised! A classic case of oversimplification The idea that drinking water after massage matters is a hopeless oversimplification, easily undermined by a cursory understanding of biochemistry.
Metabolic wastes are already ubiquitous in tissue fluids, and they are constantly being produced and recycled. While massage has never been shown to have any significant effect on these processes — except to actually impair lactic acid removal! — it doesn’t even make logical sense that water would have anything to do with it. Anything the body can get rid of it is going to get rid of, with or without massage, and with or without any extra water.
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The body is good at handling metabolic wastes, and even many exogenous poisons, without any special help. If it wasn’t, we’d really be up the creek. It’s certainly nice to offer patients some water after massage, to quench whatever thirst they may have. But it is not medically important for any specific biological reason, and it perpetuates several minor myths we would be better off without. Massage doesn’t really “detoxify.” Water doesn’t detoxify. And lactic acid is a useful metabolite, not a waste product. Adequate hydration is easy and mild dehydration is not a health risk.
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