When Lymphatic Massage is NOT Okay

Understanding When Lymphatic Massage Should Be Avoided

To better understand, let’s start with a quick rundown of what lymphatic massage actually does to the body:
Practically every fiber of your body is bathed in fluid that serves as nourishment for your cells. This fluid contains both good and bad substances that your lymphatic system is responsible for absorbing, evacuating, cleaning, and transporting.

Lymphatic therapy helps to speed up this process by mimicking and stimulating the body’s own lymphatic vessel contractions. However, there are a few situations where we wouldn’t want to speed this process along because it would either put more stress on an overworked system, or not allow the body to fight off a pathogen entirely.

These Situations Are:

• Acute Infection: When an acute infection is present, we want to give the body time to heal at its own pace. This is because MLD can push these substances into the lymph channels before the body has a chance to eliminate them through phagocytosis in the local area.
  If you perform lymphatic drainage, it is possible to spread the infection before the body has made it inert. It’s best to wait a few days until the condition is no longer acute. When you feel like you are starting to recover, lymphatic drainage can help with the cleanup and make you bounce back more quickly. In our clinic, you must be fever-free for 72 hours just to be on the safe side.
  
• Thrombosis (Blood Clot): As with any type of massage, thrombosis and phlebitis are conditions that can lead to free-floating blood clots if there’s an increase in the circulatory load. Now, usually, people with these conditions will be in a hospital because it can be extremely painful. But often with this condition, people experience a significant amount of swelling that has a rapid onset so they end up in our office.
  These folks need to be sent to the hospital immediately for testing and treatment. People who are bedridden, have had a recent surgery, or who are flying for extended periods of time have a greater likelihood of developing thrombosis in their extremities. This is why it’s so important to move around and get your blood pumping every day!
  
• Kidney Failure: Your kidneys are so vitally important that we get two of them! After cell waste and debris are removed from your tissues and transported back to the bloodstream via the lymphatic system, the blood is taken to your other organs including the kidneys. Here it will be filtered by specialized blood vessels.
  This filtration process will either send healthy fluid back to the heart or waste products will be transported to the ureters > bladder > eliminated. This is an efficient system that processes fluid rapidly. Manual Lymphatic Drainage can push a lot more of this fluid back towards the heart, so we are basically increasing the amount of fluid the kidneys will now have to process. We never want to do anything to put more workload on an organ that is already not functioning properly – hence, no lymphatic massage.

• Major Untreated Heart Problems: And on that same note, major heart problems such as untreated congestive heart failure are also contraindicated. If the heart is not fully functioning a person may develop edema due to lack of venous return. But if we use MLD and return more fluid into the heart, it would only stress it more, possibly worsening the condition.

Manual Lymphatic Drainage is very much appropriate for people who have had lymph nodes removed or who have had radiation therapy. Even if you are not experiencing symptoms of lymphedema, it’s important to support your lymphatic system and be educated on signs and symptoms of onset.

But it’s incredibly important that you receive bodywork from a practitioner who is knowledgeable on how to augment these sessions accordingly. You don’t want to be pushing fluid or creating inflammation in a quadrant of the body where the lymphatic system is not fully intact. This is incredibly important.

If you have ever had any lymph nodes removed or if you’ve had radiation therapy, give our office a call. We be happy to talk with you about this and how you can best support your system moving forward.

Key Takeaways

• Don’t do Manual Lymphatic Drainage (MLD) if you have an infection or a fever, a deep vein thrombosis, kidney failure, or if you have congestive heart failure.
  
• Even though this technique is gentle, it’s applied very specifically which makes it powerful and there are a few conditions that are off limits.
  
• There are some other general contraindications but those are more things you just need to be aware of and augment accordingly with your doctor or lymphatic therapist.
  
• For instance, if you have IBS or ulcerative colitis, lymphatic drainage can be very helpful, you just need to be mindful of working too deep in the abdomen, listen to your body, and avoid MLD during a flare-up.

I hope you find this helpful. After reading this, you may be asking what MLD can be helpful for?
The truth is, Lymphatic Drainage can help with most ailments. I found this work initially because my pathology teacher was going through the contraindications of regular Swedish massage (there are a LOT).

Most every time she would talk about a situation where you wouldn’t want to do regular massage, she would say “but you can do lymphatic drainage.” Over and over she would say this. I became so intrigued and she encouraged me to go get certified in lymphatic drainage. I instantly fell in love with this work and never looked back. I’ve seen this work do incredible things for people. I love its gentle approach and how supportive it is.

All that to say, if you are reading this, you would likely benefit from a lymphatic massage. Give our office a call and mention this newsletter and I will happily do a free 10 min phone consultation to discuss your case and see what the best approach would be moving forward.