Well, hello there. Today I decided to swap out my red paint for green paint. So instead of painting a muscle, I'm painting a system, the lymphatic system to be specific.
And as far as systems of the body go, this one is probably the most important in terms of our general health and gets the least notoriety. So today I'm going to do the best I can to explain as much as I can in this quick little video. As I start out by locating the clavicle, which is important for reasons I will get to in a minute, I want to point out a couple of really basic facts about the lymphatic system that you need to keep in mind.
Number one, it's a one-way system unlike the circulatory system. This means it travels in one direction from distal to proximal. Number two, it's comprised of vessels, lymph nodes, and docks. Number three, it divides the body into two very peculiar segments.
And number four, gravity is not its friend. So, so far we see the left and the right clavicle, the outline of a heart, and we're starting to see in red and blue the subclavian veins and arteries. None of these are considered part of the lymphatic system, but they're all important and here's why. The lymphatic system dumps into the left and right subclavian veins, which is the blue part. And they, of course, are part of the circulatory system, which the heart is responsible for moving its contents, blood, through the body.
I'm including the vena cava and the aorta because talk to me. in between these two vessels is one of the most important elements of the lymphatic system. The most glorified lymph node in the body, the cisterna cilii is the converging point for all lymph vessels coming from the entire lower half of the body, the left arm and hand, the left side of the torso, and the left side of the head and neck. The lymph from here then travels up and dumps into the left subclavian vein through the thoracic duct, which is not so aptly named because it only gets lymphed from half of the thoracic cavity. I didn't paint these in the order of the that I'm describing them, nor am I describing them in the order that I painted them, but just to finish that thought, the lymph vessels on the right side of the torso, the right arm, and the right side of the head and neck dump into the right subclavian vein through the right lymphatic duct, which is aptly named. To back up a couple of educational steps, the green lines I'm painting all over my friend are called lymph vessels.
They're called such because the fluid they contain is actually lymph, just as blood vessels are called blood vessels because they contain blood. But what is lymph you want to know? I'm so glad you asked.
As blood gets pushed by the heart into the arteries and reaches the capillary level, most of that blood gets picked up by the veins at the capillary level and gets pulled back into the heart. But some of that fluid gets lost and becomes interstitial fluid. And this is where the lymphatic system comes in. Lymph capillaries pick up that interstitial fluid and that fluid, because it's in the lymph system, is now lymph.
As I mentioned at the beginning, lymph only travels in one direction. It wants to get back to the heart. The coolest part about the lymphatic system, though, is that it's kind of a security check. Unlike blood vessels, lymph vessels have these little bubbles called lymph nodes that are responsible for cleaning that fluid out before it gets returned back into the circulatory system. And if you remember, the cisterna chyli is also a lymph node, but it's got the responsibility of providing extra security for all the lymph coming from the lower half of the body.
So we've got these lymph vessels everywhere that are trying to get this fluid cleaned out and returned back. into the circulatory system so it can be blood and do what blood does. But the circulatory system has the heart to pump that blood all throughout the body and the lymphatic system does not.
This is where we come in. Manual therapists can do an amazing job of offering lymph a hand when it falls into dysfunction. And there's a lot of reasons why it can fall into dysfunction. If a system needs to push its fluids through its vessels and doesn't have a pump, it relies on external sources to make that happen. So kind of like some cool animal or insect that has adapted to an otherwise devastatingly hazardous environment, the lymphatic system relies on the movement of the muscles that surround its vessels to help push that lymph back to the heart.
To explain this with a little more detail, when a muscle contracts, it shortens and gets thicker. That contraction will often push on a lymph vessel, urging the lymph itself to move in the direction it needs to go. So kind of like when the pink ladies push Sandy to be standing. right in front of Dani at the bonfire scene in Greece, and they knew they were meant to be together. So what happens if the muscles, for whatever reason, can't move or aren't moving?
What happens if there's a trauma to the tissues, or a joint is arthritic, or a brain can no longer fire synapses that make a muscle move, or a tissue becomes diseased and lymph nodes need to be taken out? Obviously, none of these scenarios are ideal, but they happen. And when they happen, lymph pools. It creates lymphedema, which is a swell of a region that can also result in a hardening or thickening of the skin, a feeling of heaviness or tightness, a limited range of motion, and an increased risk of recurring infections. As I add the highlights and finishing touches onto my painted on lymph nodes, system, I want to talk about how to actually perform manual lymphatic drainage.
I'm not going to demo any of these techniques in this video because there are so many versions of how to do it correctly. But what I want to emphasize is everything that we've reviewed in this video this video about how the lymphatic system works. If lymph moves distal to proximal and you try to push that lymph from distal to proximal, you're going to create a traffic jam and clog that vessel up and not make much progress.
Begin your work by pumping the area clean that is most proximal and then work out incrementally distally from there, constantly keeping the end of the vessel open so that the lymph that you guide up towards its respective duct has somewhere to go. And if you look at the cisterna kylie the rock star of all lymph nodes you might notice that it lives just under the diaphragm so as we take a deep breath in the diaphragm pulls down into the abdominal cavity providing a personal pump to the cisterna kylie once again emphasizing the importance of breath