Introduction to Lymph and Chronic Pain

Even your nutrients that you put in through your food and your supplements have a very difficult time going into the cell because they're living in waste.

What I call the Jenga piece. Ever play Janga and you pull that one piece out and everything falls apart? The lymphatics to me are that. So if your lymphatic system doesn't work as well as it can, all the other systems are going to struggle more.

Welcome back to another episode on redefining wellness podcast. I'm your host, Dr. J. Ben Moore. And today I am here with Dr Perry Nicholson. He is an expert in chronic pain.

So if you've got pain out there, he's going to have a solution for you. One of his topics that he loves to talk about is lymph, which, hey, I've really gotten into lymph over the last few years.

If you got swelling, if got puffiness, weight gain, If you've even got detox pathways that are backed up from mold, parasites, bacteria, you need to know how to do lymph and do it right.

And by the way, most of us do wrong. If your hearing all sorts of things about fascia and blood flow and movement and how they correlate, this guy is your expert.

So Dr. Perry, thank you for joining me on this really interesting topic. Thank you very much, my friend, for having me back. Always love to have a chat with you and great work that you're putting out there on the lymphatics.

I watch your reels and your channels all the time. It's really great material you are putting there to help a lot of people. And I'm sure you've found that working lymphatic in that functional medicine and functional health world has been really valuable.

For sure, I mean, not only if you work lymph correctly, you reduce swelling and inflammation, pain and weight gain. So all of you wanted to lose a little bit of weight, this is part of the solution.

Or if have chronic pain, why it goes away when you move is because you're pumping your lymph, right? So like when wake up and your back hurts, we've all been there, and you moved and it gets better, lymph drainage.

This guy is the expert, Dr. Perry here, but also All of my clients that are doing a mast cell, histamine, SIRS, lymph, when it backs up, puts a pressure on your system that can be alleviated.

And simply just doing some of the techniques that you teach, which I've told people about, can a really easy, at home, cost-effective solution. Yeah, I agree a thousand percent.

I mean, that's what I dedicated my life to is to teach people. Not just lymphatics, I mean that's a big part of it, but don't forget about all the other body fluids too.

You know the blood flow, arteries and veins, and even the fluid that coats around the brain and the spinal cord, the cerebrospinal fluid, And then of course the fluids that your cells live in, which is called pre-lymph.

So it becomes lymph. And what I tell people is all these fluids have different names, But I don t really care about the names because they flow into each other.

and they form from each other. So if you have an issue with one, you got an issues with them all. And then, you know, what really shifted my life and relationship to movement, right?

I've been teaching movement-based rehab, movement based therapies and studying functional movement and chronic pain for a long period of time. But I never just stopped back and looked at the overall just, it was like the elusive obvious that Moshe Feldenkrais called it, where it's like right in front of you, but it seems so simple that you're just overlooking it.

looking for complicated things. And I said, well, you know what, maybe all this movement-based stuff just helps us because, yeah, your moving fluids and you're getting blood to circulate in areas that are likely stagnant.

Whole-Body Assessment for Back Pain

That's why we may have talked about it on the prior podcast. that osteopathic, classic osteopathy medicine has probably been the most influential thing in my entire thinking process and career.

And Andrew Taylor Still, who founded that, said in the late 1800s, I mean, this cat was ahead of his time. He was all about it's limb flow and blood flow, people.

If you don't get that down, nothing else works. When I saw that and then I did it for myself and it saved myself, that's it. That's the number one thing that I go after.

So for now, I don't do anything with movement or any manual therapies or anything intervention until I understand and I know what's happening with the fluids when I do that and after I did that.

because if you don't, you're gonna get lost in the quicksand and that quick sand is called chronic pain. So I wanna connect everybody to this. I talked about a couple of like symptoms at the beginning, but can you tell me a story about client that's come into you, a normal everyday person and just walk me through what they experienced, what you did and what the outcome was?

Sure, yeah, I'd be happy to. So one of the sayings that I teach in all of my work is that no system in the body ever works alone, never gets injured alone never heals alone.

There's no such thing as an isolated injury in a body, those such things as isolated healing. When people come to me, they've had a lot of stuff already done to where the symptoms are, or where their pain is, where they pointed to, And you know, that's a smart play, honestly.

I mean, if something hurts, the logical first step is, well, let me do something to where it hurts and then let's see what happens. But see, when something's chronic, you already have your answer.

that whatever you're doing ain't working because it's chronic. So then you have to either change what you are doing to the side of pain, which sometimes we'll get it, but often not, because I have people doing 500 different therapies or biohacks on a single region and they're suffering and sinking quicker into the quicksand.

And so what I do is I say, okay, Well, let me just look and think maybe it's coming from somewhere else or it is from a completely different system in the body that nobody's ever looking at.

So that's where limp comes into play. Cause if you have like musculoskeletal pain in your knee, for instance, I'll just pick a body part or your lower back.

That's a good one. Like lower. Because nobody has lower back chronic issues in the world today, right? Most people will go straight after the lower-back.

And I see that a lot. So I'll bring in a case of somebody who came to see me for that. Where this person had lower back injuries, they were diagnosed with some osteoarthritis in the lower-back, which honestly most humans have.

It doesn't mean that's going to be causing your pain. Sometimes it can. They actually had a diagnosis of a couple of disc issues. disc desiccation, like some of them are almost gone, and bulges slash herniations at two different levels.

But we also know that just because you have that, it doesn't mean that that is the bullseye ground zero reason why you had your back pain, because your allowed to have more than one problem, right?

And you know, that as well is that research says that. Just because have some mechanical issues with something, or biological issues with something doesn't mean that that's the underlying cause of what your issues are.

And they had everything you could think of done to that back, like chiropractic, distractions, laser, ultrasound, heat, ice. They did do some low back treatment protocols, physical therapy type things.

But it didn't really make a difference for them and they were still suffering. And they. Kind of like at a point where people usually see me when they've said, doc, I've tried everything else that is supposed to work and all the research says that this is really good for back pain, but my life is still.

So I figured, well, just give you a shot because they found me like on Instagram talking about this kind of stuff. And so what I do when they come on in is I usually do the exact opposite of what everybody else has done.

I, I use it. Don't even go near the back for treatment. Actually look at it first when you come to see me because you would expect me to do that. But I'm going to look at all the other different parts of the body, especially I want to watch you move.

The first thing I am going do is put you through what's called seven different fundamental human movement patterns. Like can you bend over and touch your toes?

Can you extend backwards? can your rotate? Stand on one leg? Move your head and your neck well? And can your shoulders have good mobility and can you even attempt to do, uh, what's called an overhead squat?

That's some of the stuff from my, my friends, great cook and Lee Burton from functional movement systems. And then I'm just gonna do some real logical tests.

You'll see how well your nervous system is responding to things. Checking the cranial nerves in the brain stem and your cerebellum just to see if you can coordinate movement well for some basic patterns with your hands and feet.

Because I got news for you. If you cant feel things well with you feet and hands, your back is going to hurt you at some point in time it's going get you and last time I checked your neck is connected to your lower back.

And many people haven't looked at the neck in relationship to what it's doing. And then maybe the low back is the compensation pattern for that. Then I'm going to see how they breathe.

I want to look and see where are you breathing from. or if you are breathing at all, because many times this individual is stuck in hypervigilance, hyperarousal, fight or flight, sympathetic dominance, which is wearing them down, increases tension everywhere, first of all that increased tension decreases lymph flow and blood flow like everywhere.

especially to your lower back. And then many of them are breathing from the neck and the shoulders and not down low where we want to see it in the belly, lower rib cage and posterior ribcage for your thoracic diaphragm.

Then I'm going to say, can you hinge in your hips? That's a big one. Like I want to see how they would bend over to pick something up on the ground. And 10 times out of 10, they bend it over in the lower back and they put all the stress on lower the back.

They don't know how to pattern sitting back into their glutes and their booty and hinging from the hips. So they can use the strongest muscle on your body, which is your glute and your hips to drive the movement and not your lower-back.

Because here's another news flash. There's no therapy program in the world that's going to work with you for very long. If you go back out in world and you bend over from your lower lumbar spine all the time, it's gonna get you again.

So that like a lifestyle habit that is crushing your back, right? So I do a manual assessment too, which means I touch literally almost every square inch of your body, not just your low back.

I have an assessment where I check people. It's called a zero assessment. because we're going to ground zero. I check the body in a very specific order and pattern.

i just don't willy-nilly start pushing on tissue because it hurts. So let's say your lower back hurts, I will always start my assessment at the collarbone region.

above the collarbone and below the collarbone region. One primary reason is that's where all the lymphatics in the body drain. And if that tight tensor backed up, you're going to have lymphatic stagnation somewhere else.

It's definitely going be down near your lower back without question. But when you understand circulatory and circulation systems, you know that the lumbar veins drain actually up into, I'm not going too deep into anatomy here, but it follows up what's called the azygous and hemiazygos veins along the spine.

It can dump into the superior vena cava at the collarbone. So if you're stuck at the collarbone, I know you can have vein backflow in your lower back and that's going to crush you.

If you have issues with your disc, cause I'm going ask why the hell do you a disc issue in the first place? And why do have such severe degeneration and arthritis in lower your back?

One thing that can cause that is when joints don't get good blood flow over years, they start to die.

What Lymph Is and Why the Collarbone Matters

and you get decay. So to me, when you have osteoarthritis, I already know you got a blood flow problem, man. I just need to see where else in relationship to where it is because bloodflow doesn't just go to your side of pain, it goes everywhere.

When I do the zero assessment, check for tension in tissues that you never even thought might be painful. So what do I mean by that? You're so focused on your lower back that that's all you're paying attention to, which sometimes can make your back pain worse because all your focusing on is your low back and then you get neuroplastic pain because the brain learns the pain pattern in the back, and it keeps it on a loop.

But I can guarantee you, I'm going to find two or three other spots on you body that when I press on them, they hurt more than your lowest back. but they'll surprise you because you didn't know they were there until I touched them and I'm going to give you two big ones.

One big one is anywhere in the abdomen, like if you have lower back pain, I am going press on every part of the lower rib cage, underneath the ribcage, all the way down to your navel and i'm gonna find something that you really don't like.

And that means in my world, stagnated lymphatics and stagnating blood, which will cause pain. And the other one is something up in the rib cage. I've been taking care of people for 30 years.

Most of it for people in hard to fix chronic pain cases. Honestly, I think the top area that I look at the most these days, one, is the collarbone. You always have to start there.

One, I told you because the lip flow, but two, that's how blood flow gets to your brain and out of your. So if you got an issue there, your brains going to be a hot mess and a half.

Two is the rib cage and the thoracic spine. The ribcage and the thoracic spine should have a lot of mobility, the ability to move, twist, bend, turn, and expand.

Most people have severe restriction in the rib cage and in thoraxic spines. And the number one rule in this for movement is if you lose the ability to move in one place, your body will take more movement from somewhere else.

That's just how energy works and how physics works. So if we look at the rib cage and the thoracic spine, if you get stuck there in tents, yeah, you really don't feel that so much because the body compensates.

But year after year, sometimes five, 10 years, If you don' move there, where else are you going to move from? Your lower back. So your lumbar spine which is actually supposed to be stable.

You're supposed be able in your lumber spine. It is supposed move, but not like a lot. You can overmove the lumbar spine. And then that's when you get like a herniation or the back pain.

So that where I learned the rule of go after where somebody has a decrease in mobility and it's not painful. Like it doesn't hurt. Then you open that up and what they usually tell you is that that is the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life.

When you worked in this area, I felt so much better in lower back. Does that make sense? Yes, it does. So I know I've been talking for like 20 minutes, but what I want you to see is the thinking process of how you have to, one, look at the entire body, two, when your lower back hurts, the number one place you should look is abdomen and the polar opposite in the front, for sure.

But then you'll have do a full body examination to be able to get a peek into the life of the individual human being carrying the low back around. So interesting because yeah, when you evaluate a person as a doctor, you're taught, go to the point of pain, touch it so that they know that you know where the pain is.

Do something there so they that know you are understanding that that is the place that the want fixed. Then sometimes you go to the polar opposite place.

You go there big toe, you got their abdomen, and you've got a collarbone, as you said. And that might actually be the solution, which the majority of docs are not doing.

They're not going to, they're, not paying attention to because, connect those dots for the average person if they are thinking about the physiology of the body.

So let's talk about length specifically in a little bit more detail. What you know, you mentioned the collarbone and I'm sitting here thinking based on all the knowledge I have collar bone.

This is where a lot of the drainage happens. That's where A lot Of the major lymph vessels connect. Can you walk us through why the Collarbone specifically?

is so important to lymph flow, but also in that we haven't really explained what lymph is. So can you say what length is and then the collarbone? Yeah, great question.

I love this. It's like throwing a ball over a home plate for me on this one. This is like one of my favorite questions in general is what's a big deal about the color bone?

Well, one, because nobody ever really looks there because they don't typically come in and say, doc, I got to see you. My collarbones killing me. It's somewhere else.

So what is lymphatics? Well, I mean, it's honestly the primary fluid in your body that keeps you from not dying. It is the biggest part of your immune system and it kills things and traps things that are trying to kill you.

Your immune systems can scan it, bag it and tag it to get rid of it. And so it also transports stuff. It transport some fatty acids and some hormones.

But its primary job is a waste management system of your body. So you can get rid of waste inside of you that's not supposed to stay inside you. And some people might want to call that detoxification.

I don't even use that word anymore because it seems detoxifications seems to be like a trigger word for something. I just say waste management. The majority of your organs in your body are there for waste-management, for goodness sakes.

That's why they're there to get stuff out that makes its way in or you willingly put into it through what you eat and what your drink or your supplements.

Because supplements become waste too. So if you're taking supplements to try to help waste management, but your toilets are all backed up, that's not going to work out well for you.

That's why sequencing is really important. So the, the lymph keeps the fluid. This is the big one. It keeps. The fluid that your cells live in clean, it keeps to fluid, that you got a couple of trillion cells in there.

And they live in that fluid is called interstitial fluid. It's also known as pre-lymphatics, which means that. Fluid as soon as it crosses over into the lymphatic system, it magically is now called lymphatics.

But so to me, the names of the fluid are absolutely clinically irrelevant because they flow one into each other. And when cells live in waste. You, they slowly die and it's very difficult to make new cells when the ones you already have live in waste.

That's why stuff stays chronic because you've lost the ability to get the regeneration. that your body is trying to do because your environment is no longer physiologically set up for it.

And so when the lymphatics backflow, you build up pressure around those cells and that impacts what can make its way into a cell and what could make it's way out of a So even your nutrients that you put in through your food and your supplements have a very difficult time going into the cell because they're living in waste, right?

So that's why it's like the what I call the Jenga piece. Ever play Janga and you pull that one piece out and everything falls apart? The lymphatics to me are that.

So if your lymphatic system doesn't work as well as it can, all the other systems are going to struggle more.

Lymph, Blood Flow, and Constipation

So what I do is I just go after that system first to check it, see how it is, rule it out, and see much of a player it. First of all, if you have chronic pain and autoimmune disease, I already know it's a play.

I mean, that's the given. Just need for you to realize it after I touch all these areas where the lymph is located. Because, you know, lymph will get backed up where your site of pain is.

it's also going to be backed up in a lot of other places as well. And then why that collarbone region is so important, this is going tie into what I told you before, is Well, that's where all the lymphatics are trying to go.

And then people say, they asked me, said, well, why is it going there? I'm like, I don't know. I didn't design the human body. That's the way it works.

It works based on pressure. So you need to understand physics in order to how fluids move in the body, once you understand. Everything in relationship to fluid flow in body makes complete sense.

Lymphatics flow based on movement and it flows based. On breathing, breathing and movement, simple change pressure. So for the average person. To give a little bit of a breakdown of lymphatics is it's your waste management system, like you said, it is all the junk, the dying tissues of cells that are pushing out all of the waste, its the mold, metals, parasites, bacteria, crap we breathe in that shouldn't be there, waste food that should not be, all that stuff.

It doesn't have its own ability to move, so you gotta move. That's that breathing, that's the movement. And if it's not gotten out, it is causing problems.

If you get it flowing properly all the way to the toilet. We're good. But there's some hangups in there because we've talked before and there is a lot of conversation around the differences between lymph and what it's doing and blood flow and it what's it doing.

How do those interact and how do you operate differently when you're working with somebody on, hey, it is lymph but you actually also need to work on your blood But here's the real little secret.

When you work on a lymph, you're also working on blood flow, You're just probably doing it by accident. You don't realize that you are impacting the flow at the same time, okay?

And that'll tie into how I'm gonna bring it back to the thoracic spine and rib cage again. So first of all, thank you for that summary, because it really is just that simple.

Like if you can't get rid of the waste that's stuck inside of you, your gonna have inflammation. And chronic inflammation is the number one cause of chronic disease, right?

So you have to be able to get that system to move. And you get rid of waste the other way, you poop it out, maybe, but many people are constipated and they're constapated because they are under too much physical stress and duress.

Let me jump in here. Constipation. Now, I know what my opinion of this is, but the average person that walks in my clinic, constipation means you haven't pooped in a week.

What is your standard of not normal flow? That's a great question. And I'm going to say that I've seen that it varies based on an individual. I don't think it's as easy as saying that, oh, you're supposed to have three bowel movements a day, right?

Some people have never had that clinically. Um, I'd be happy if somebody was able to give a bowel movement once a Because you know, you don't want that stuff stacking up inside of you when you're descending colon either, because that's supposed to go out as well.

But constipation is a huge thing that I run into. One, Because of the amount of stress that people are under, which will just cause consti-pation, cause you put yourself in a fight or flight scenario.

And they're likely dehydrated as, well, and they are not drinking enough water or, throw in cell salt and electrolytes and all that kind of good stuff as.

But the constipation also will be stuck when you have poor blood flow and lymph flow in your colon. Listen, if a colon doesn't get bloodflow, it ain't going to be happy, right?

And so the sympathetic dominance, hypervigilance, fight or flight decreases blood-flow to all the digestive tract. because at that time when you're trying to run for your life, it's not the time to pop a squat and poop or eat because you gonna die because something's gonna kill you.

So that week after week, month after month, year after year of the decrease in flow slowly destroys the tissue and it breaks down. And then you get leaky gut because can't make a new one, right?

Can't a make new it. That stagnation that's there will cause like a cesspool that you see. If you ever look in nature and you'll see a pond in the middle of nowhere that is not flowing to or from anything, it's just nasty.

Man, is just like smells and there's all sorts of stuff in there that's gonna kill you. And that what can happen for you as well. But here's the first thing that I see happen with people is when they start to get their lymphatics to move, Well, then they start pooping.

Yeah, cuz it can make a difference in the bowel movements as well. But for me constipation is always gonna have a component of the lymphatic system and the blood flow system combination very interesting and there's a third component that we've talked through because I think every component you've Talked about is movement and I know you love movement.

That's been a Well, 28 years now of how movement affects lymph and blood flow. But also the third component we talked about was fascia. And fascias is a topic that nobody knew existed besides, you know, a few guys that were doing like, uh, You know cadaver labs back in school.

Yeah, stuff like that. Right? But now fasciitis is like blowing up across social media fascial and it's like fascio caused everything. So how does fascious intertwine with these topics?

That's a great question. Yeah. I mean, it's same with lymph. Years ago, they just even disregarded fascia. That was no big deal. A surgeon would just cut right through the fasciitis to get to the quote unquote good stuff underneath.

But, you know, then they started to have in the World Facial Congresses, which I went to the very first one years ago, a long time ago. And it's grown a lot over the years because, they're learning more and more about fascia, Which is basically connective tissue that interconnects everything in body.

But here's a dirty little secret. Everything you do impacts fasci. Every movement, every manual technique impacts faster. Even your thinking process impacts fast, for goodness sake, because you impact your biology based on how you're thinking.

But it's the same thing with length. I've been doing lymphatics for 15 years. When I started with lymphatic, people said, what the hell is a lymphotic system?

And now you can't turn around without seeing lymph and fascia everywhere, which is great to see because they're important, right? Let me tie it back into the movement.

Like, here's the thing, man, I've been working fascia for 20 years, you know, trying to influence the fascial system. And there's a lot of different techniques out there that can do it.

I have been doing movement-based therapies for almost 30 years. But here's what I'm saying is that I was doing all that stuff and I still got sick. Like about 15 years ago, there'd be a recap from our prior episode, I got really sick, man.

Fascia, Movement, and Fluid Flow

I mean, my whole body just decided to kind of turn on me and my immune system went bananas. And I was getting infections and swelling and inflammation and all these different diagnoses of, I think you got this, you've got that.

I mean, it felt like I had everything. And then I'm thinking to myself, well, what the hell, man? Why do I have that? I eat good? Uh, I move all the time.

I've been training and working out since I was 14 years old. And I know about fascia and I worked that stuff, but I will still got sick. That's it. Well, well, what's missing.

What the lymphatic system? Yeah. Right. Cause I'm thinking, here's the thing too, man. Listen, when you work fascial and you move, you'll move length like you're always moving length.

So I said, Well. If I'm moving limp with that, why am I getting, so why is my lymphatic system is a mess? And that's where I realized, oh, well, it makes a difference on where you work your fascia and where are you working your lymphatics as to how it's going to move.

You know, so let's say you just jump on a vibration plate, for instance, because I get asked this a lot. Do you like vibration plates? Yeah, I love them.

But when you jump onto them, you're shaking up the whole body like a big giant snow globe and everything's moving. It doesn't mean you going to unblock anything just because you shake it.

I'm going to contend that you probably won't. So what happens is that, you need to understand the pressure flow routes that I said before, because if you don't know where fluid's trying to get to once you're trying move it, that's going be a big problem.

Let's say for instance, if, jump on a vibration plate and you shake everything up from the bottom, what if your blocked at the collarbone and the rib cage and thoracic spine and it's really, really tense and tight and too much pressure is there and you're trying to move stuff into area that has too many pressure that can't take the pressure.

Well, what's going to happen is that the fluid is just going go back out to where you are trying move it from. So it is really like shaking up a snow globe and nothing has any place to go and that's when the epiphany hit me.

Yeah, you can work fashion, man. You can dig into that sucker any way that floats your boat. But what I'm going to say is you need to understand why you're pushing on point A before you push it on Point B.

So in my world, let's say for instance, I want to work the fascia like in your calf. Right? Because that's a big one. So calf muscle, first of all, is called the second heart.

If you want to be technical, it could be the soleus muscle. And because when you move that sucker, It moves vein flow and lymph flow back up. the lymph up towards the collarbone and the vein flow back up toward the heart.

So anytime you work the calf and pump the calves through walking or rebounding, it can send the fluid up. And I'm like, okay, that's great. But what if it, can't get there?

Cause you got something blocking it in the halfway point, like maybe at your belly. the belly or the crease of your groin or back of the knee, because you've been sitting all day, eight hours a day for 42 weeks a year at your work, and it gets really, really tight.

So I'm going to say I want to jump into that calf and tight calves, by the way, big cause of lower back pain and tie calves will decrease ankle range of motion.

And when you decrease anchor range emotion, you're going throw off your whole hip chain all the up. So when I, I going strip your fascia along your shin and your bone and you calf, and I am going do fascial stuff on the ball of my foot, right?

You see all these things, but rolling the bar up underneath there in my, awesome. But in my world, I don't do that anymore. What I'll do is I have to make sure that the route of that fascia, when you work it, that flow is open to the collarbone.

Because I'm going to, stand by this until I am dead because I know how physics works. If you're stuck at your collar bone and tightness or tension and poor breathing, over-contracting the muscles that are here, You're breathing with your mouth, you're tight in your sternum and your ribs and you thoracic spine.

You can't change enough pressure here to help suck the pressure from the calf up after you work it. Guess what's going to come back in my world? Well, your calf muscle and fascial tightness, because here's the coolest thing, man.

This is awesome. See, you can work the fascia, like tight fasca, and then you have to say, well, what the hell makes it tight? Well, I'm gonna make it easy for you.

Life makes a tight. Habits and behaviors makes tight, but so yeah, restricted fasci can influence fluid flow, But here's the rep. It goes the other way.

Stagnated fluids and the interstitial fluid changes the chemical structure of the fluid, and you can actually get an increase in what they call pro-inflammatory cytokines that cause inflammation.

And you release different chemicals in there, one's called TGF-beta-1. Tgf-Beta 1 increases fibrosis. increases scarring or that fat. Cause you can call it, I don't care what you call a scarred adhesion.

Those are semantics to me. Who cares what to call. I still want to open up and get the flow moving. So what I'm saying is the stagnated fluid can cause the issue with the fascia.

That's why it's not just about fascial. It's a piece of it. but the fluid flow systems are also a piece of it. That's why I created the zero assessment.

So I would go and work from the collarbone up, so I get to see what's everything like around your head, neck, face, and brain. Then I can see where it's like working my way down to your calf.

And the calf would be the last thing that I end up working on. Does that make sense? Because what I said before was this, if I got a moment to expand on this.

So let's talk, everything is trying to flow to the collarbone for lymphatics because that's the location that has the most negative pressure, lowest pressure in the body cavities for fluid to float to.

So the lowest pressure is here by design because all the other areas of the body are the highest pressure. So you have the high pressure in your feet and your hands and in you brain.

They are all trying to go to the collarbone. Right? So if the collarbone region is pressure, is too high. from tightness or tension or restriction or mobility or breathing dysfunction, stuff like that, hypervism, it's fight or flight, then the pressure is higher here, which means it pushes pressure outwards.

So then you stay high pressure in your feet, in you hands, and your head. That's why this area has to be opened first. And this is really clinically important.

Because if you don't optimize this pressure system here, I don' care what you do to your hands and feet and head, you're pushing against physics. Physics win every time.

You'll get back flow. I'm listening to you and I can see you. So for those who can't see, you it's a matter of operations, right? So we've got that. We've talked about lymph blood flow, fascia movement, generally as a solution to inflammation, swelling and pain as, as.

A big portion of the topic, but it can also be detox pathways. It can be so many. it can affect so many parts of the body because overall you can't clear anything if your lymph is backed up because blood flow does not clear toxicities infections waste any of that it's the lymph and lymph has no muscle movement on its own so therefore it backs up more easily because there's no like It doesn't flex and move itself.

Blood vessels do. You have a heart that pumps it. There isn't anything like that for lymph. So what you're saying is for a lymph, the collarbone area is kind of the biggest portion of backup that you see.

And if you have any extremity issues, which are your legs, your arms, or your head backup, You can't go there first, you have to identify that's the problem and then go to the middle, the trunk, to make sure that you can at least move out of those areas and to take it even a step further is for the checklist.

You must be pooping. your digestive tract must be moving. And then the internal trunk area, the collarbone area length must opened up. That would allow for all the blood flow and length and fascia everywhere else to be able to do its job.

So once you get the color bone opened, you need to make sure that you're working on the length to moving toward the corner bone areas. The fascial to works to loosen so that the lens can flow appropriately.

And then in general movement that triggers both the lymph to move but also blood to so that the cells can then once everything's opened up, move the waste out through the process that we just discussed.

And I know I just simplified everything you've said to a one minute kind of summary, but am I hitting on it? Yeah, banger, man. You nailed it. First of all, thank you for doing that.

That's it is basically a connected inter loop system that just goes around and around around. And here's the cool part, like the lymph is going to go.

It's more like a suction effect. that it is a pumping effect. And it's suction based on pressure. So every time you breathe in and out, you change what in the body?

Pressure. It's almost like a plunger in a toilet. Like I might have a clogged toilet, I'm going to plunge it. That's breathing, my friends, and that's the suction effect.

It's pulling this fluid of the lymphatics to here. But then I ask people, where does the Lymphatic system dump into? It dumps into the subclavian vein, the venous system.

And then when it goes there, it's magically not limp anymore.

Practical Takeaways and Where to Learn More

Like it just changes into, now we call it plasma. I don't care what you call, It it the same stuff. You just decided to arbitrarily give it a different name to confuse everybody.

So it goes into the vein system. If your lymph is backed up, your vein systems and stuff will go back out into veins. And here's the cool part. Because I teach blood flow techniques a ton.

Like I got one coming up this weekend on blood blow. 70% of the blood in the body resides in veins. Why is that? Because veins are like reservoirs that take overflow because they can expand.

Arteries have a difficult time doing that. So that means that you'll not only send lymphatic fluid back out in the system, you're going to send vein fluid.

back out into the system. It goes down and it goes up because the vein flow from the brain is trying to go down to the collarbone as well. And if you're stuck here, it's going to stay up there.

Then your brain becomes dirty and can't drain itself. You get neuroinflammation and then you have a very difficult time inhibiting pain and everything in the body hurts more.

But here's what I'm going tell you. If you are blocked at the it's going to put backflow pressure down into the other parts of the body and you'll get venous back flow in things like your liver, you get it down in your digestive system, and then you wonder why your digestion system struggles is because you have stagnation down in that region.

And that's why everything pushes down towards the bottom and then people end up when the veins can't take anymore, you get varicose veins. I mean, the pressure has got to go somewhere.

So it's the same thing. You have to open and optimize the at the collarbone, sternum, rib cage, and thoracic spine. So all the other fluid compartments can work.

If you're going to go dive into, let's say you've got swelling and inflammation in your leg, you can absolutely have backflow of lymphatics in that region.

Maybe you have lymphedema, or you talk, my right leg is worse than my other side. Well, the right leg still got a drain to the same place the left one's going to.

It's got to go up to collarbone. So I'm going contend you still have to open up the entire system because the leg just doesn't magically have its own issues there and it doesn't talk to the rest of the body.

So you have to, when you said like drain to trunk, that's perfectly said because I tell people in order to understand lymphatics, arteries and veins, you just need to look at a tree.

If you look a the tree in nature, it's got a big trunk and its got branches and leaves on the end. That's exactly how your vascular system works. And nothing in the leaves are gonna ever work well if your trunk is a hot mess.

So you have to clear the trunk. That's my issue with a lot of lymphatic techniques, because they're teaching dry brushing, which is great, but dry-brushing is not gonna go deep enough to get the trunks where you need it.

Then, their dry brushing, in my approach, the wrong order. I see them starting from like the feet and the hands and then going up. And I'm like, I get it because you're trying to drive that fluid up But what you do is you have to clear from top down first and then go up because that's just physics.

That's why we created the big six, like the six places where I teach people to work because one, the most amount of lymph nodes sit there and they're usually stagnated, but the order is more important than anything.

The order's based on that physics formula flow. And then you mix that with the other stuff and you can make a huge difference. So the takeaway from this one is also is that, listen, all these things flow into each other.

The lymph will go into the veins, right? And what do the vanes turn into? was going to go back to the heart because they get an oxygenated blood through the lungs and then it goes out through arterial system.

So it just loops around and goes through. But here's how it works. If you have a lot of fluid or stagnation in one place, It's very hard to put other stuff into that place because there's already too much there.

So what happens is that when you're backed up with stagnation of lymphatics and vein flow, the arterial side, no matter even if you have stuff there, it can't get into the region because already there is too You know, I think this has been really, really helpful for people to start to understand a little bit more of lymph.

I mean, i know some of these things. i work on lymph, i teach lymph but the effectiveness of walking through lymph into the veins into, the arteries making sure it connects to the gut just shows the interplay of the body and how incredibly powerful that is.

And I know people are going to want to know more about this. So as we're closing out here, how do people find you to continue to up-level their education in lymph?

Thank you very much. Great question. And I agree with everything you just said on the circulation system because the lymphatics is actually part of your vascular system.

If you type in the word lymphatic, I'm probably going to pop up somewhere because I've been doing lymphotics for many, many years. I am known as the Lymph Doc because that's my jam.

You can type in big six, B-I-G, the number six. You'll definitely see me then, because that's what I put out there to open up the Lumpatics. Or you go to stop chasing pain, just type those three words, I'll show up somewhere as well.

I mean, been posting up stuff for a long, long period of time. And you can see just many different ways of courses that you learn from us. But I have to tell you that the longer I do this stuff, Doc, is that I'm less about teaching, you know, magical techniques for something.

I teach thinking processes now. How to think about why you're doing what you are doing, but more importantly, Why the hell your body is doing what it's doing?

It's not trying to take you out on purpose. It is trying help you as best it can. And it may not make any sense to you. Why in the world is it doing this to me if it is try to help me?

Trust me, there's a reason. You just have to figure it out. And after doing this stuff for 30 years, a big part of that answer for you, my friends, is going to be stagnated lymphatics and blood flow.

Remembering that these nervous systems, like everybody's trying to calm the nervous system down, which is great, but the nerve system also impacts vascular flow and lymphatic flow, so you're still back where you came from of each one.

add it into the mix. So if you've got any issues with chronic pain, chronic inflammation, or autoimmune disease, whatever kind of label they want to throw at you, just start to take a look at those fluid systems.

Get those moving as best you can. And I guarantee you you'll see a difference in how you feel. and how you move. I don't know how much of a difference it's going to make.

Some people it can be transformational, but for another one, it could move the needle just enough to where you want to keep going. Well said, Doc, and thank you for jumping on here today and educating and helping everyone.

And I can't wait to talk to you again. For everyone listening, Jump out there, go look him up. Look up length, look up big six. And until next time, thank you everyone.

Thank you for tuning in to redefining wellness with Dr. Javin. If this episode spoke to you, please follow and share this podcast with someone who is ready to take control of their chronic health symptoms.

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Perry Nickelston, DC

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