I am asked by nearly every patient I see "What can I do in the meantime, between treatments to help myself out?".
Well, that depends. There are lots of things a person can do to help themselves out, but most often its about slight changes to habits that are not serving your body. Do you sit on your wallet? Put it in the center console while you are in the car or on your desk when sitting at work. Do you wear a bra all day, every day? Take it off when you get home and let those ribs move! (Or better yet, don't wear one at all)
A lot of times it's just breathing. Sure, you breathe without thinking about it, but when you concentrate on breathing you breathe more deeply which helps pump stagnant fluid through your body (diaphragms are super cool about pressure gradients). You can get up once an hour or so and walk around the living room, your office, or wherever you've been hiding from the kids, dog, or your spouse to get that fluid movin'. You don't need to go sweat it out at the gym to help fluid move better and more efficiently in your body. Take a "me" moment and breathe or move.
Ok, so why do we want to get all this fluid moving?
(Here comes the science, skip this part and just move, breathe and take your wallet out of your pocket if you're not interested in a deep dive.)
Well, all the fluids in your body, (blood, lymph, digestive STUFF) have to get around to do their jobs. And let me tell you, they have important jobs! Blood takes nutrients and oxygen to every tissue in your body. Heart, kidneys, brain, muscles and that little toe on your left foot you keep hitting off the coffee table. Arteries are the vessels that take oxygen-rich blood away from your heart, towards all the important stuff. They have muscular walls, because they mean business. No oxygen in a tissue means pain! Literal, the cells are dying, pain. Its called ischemia, and apparently it really hurts, let's not do that.
So what happens when the blood gets there and delivers all its goodness? It also removes waste by-products from those same tissues (ick, but super important) and takes them back to the heart through the venous system to be filtered through the lungs, kidneys or liver. Lymph takes up the excess fluid from the space between cells called interstitial fluid and keeps you from swelling up like a balloon. The veins can't seem to carry everything, so the lymphatic system picks up the slack.
But that's not all folks, inside the lymph system is a tiny network that is a massive part of our immune system. Inside the lymph nodes are huge clusters of white blood cells called macrophages which eat anything that shouldn't be there before the fluid makes its way back up to your circulatory system, aka your heart and vessels. The reason it needs you to breathe well and move is because its vessels don't have muscular walls to pump the fluid up-hill from your feet to your heart (hello, cankles!), just like your venous system taking blood back to the heart. But, lucky for us, they (veins and lymph vessels) are along-side your muscles which give them a squish when they contract (walking, pumping iron, dancing like a rockstar), and are assisted by the pressure changes that happen when you breathe.
Remember during quarantine when you sat on the couch binging Netflix for 3 days, then felt like puffy foggy junk? Probably because you didn't clear all the ickies through the system. (No, that never happened to me either)
So breathe, move, filter your blood, and let it go round and round. It's good for you, and it feels good!
We won't get into the digestive stuff this time, but we'll go there, oh yes, we'll go there. (BTW, breathing is important for that too)
-J
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