Andrew Huberman

Almost always that's somewhere in the lymphatic massage protocol, whether the protocol is for lymphedema under conditions of cancer treatment, or it's for purely cosmetic purposes.

Almost always there's an encouragement of movement of lymphatic fluid from that cisterna chyli as well, because again, that's a major reservoir just below

where the lymphatic system is going to drain back into the blood supply.

People debate where to start these lymphatic massages.

This is a whole field.

And frankly, I found differing opinions on this.

Some people say, well, you have to start, you know, at the distal limbs, meaning out towards the hands and fingers, move things in.

Other people say, well, no, you actually want to push down to the legs, then up through the legs.

There's a lot of debate here.

I think if you look at the mechanics of the lymphatic system, a couple of things become clear.

You don't want to use firm pressure.

This is not deep tissue massage.

At some point in the protocol, you're going to want to include some encouragement of drainage from the clavicle reasons for all the reasons to be discussed and from the cisterna chyli.

And then in terms of the lower legs and the legs and the arms, the out to in progression makes perfect sense.

How you order those differs depending on the practitioner and indeed, even in different research papers, they use different

I'm not so sure that it matters.

What does seem to be very important is that you're not impinging or pushing hard on the lymph nodes because you want lymph fluid in the lymph nodes for a certain period of time so that your immune system can surveil that lymph fluid and decide whether or not there are indeed any bacterial or viral infections or other contaminants that need to be dealt with by the immune system.

Let's take a couple of minutes and talk about the immune functions of the lymphatic system.

Now, for most people, when they think about the lymphatic system, they think about the immune system.

And that's because most anyone who's ever had a cold or some other virus has had the experience of having their lymph nodes feel kind of swollen and maybe even a little bit painful.