OMM Treatment: Lymphatic Technique

00:00 Manipulation is the therapeutic application of a force.

00:04 And a force can come from a lot of different ways.

00:06 I can provide the force as a provider.

00:08 The force can come from gravity.

00:10 It can come from physiologic actions within a patient— like the heartbeat, like respirations or the fluctuation of cerebrospinal fluid.

00:18 Every osteopathic medical student is taught 7 different ways to do manipulation, to free up motion in the body.

00:26 And we’re going to talk about each of those 7 types of manipulation, what they are, and how they differ so you can identify what’s being done or how you might treat a patient with a particular issue.

00:38 The 7 different types can be broken down into many different ways.

00:41 I like thinking of them as 3 tissue treatments which will be myofascial, lymphatic, and soft tissue and those are where we treat the tissue to get a response.

00:53 There is a release by positioning called counterstrain where if you hold the body in a particular position, the body will start to heal itself.

01:01 The neural mechanisms will take over and reorient how the body is thinking about what’s going on.

01:07 There are 2 more muscle based articulatory techniques that are more dramatic in what you see and that’s high velocity, low amplitude thrusting and muscle energy.

01:17 And the 7th type is cranial osteopathic manipulative medicine where the craniosacral rhythm and the motion of the cranium is manipulated to help free up motion and make a person feel better.

01:29 So let’s start reviewing each of the 7 types.

01:32 The first type of manipulation we’re going to talk about is called lymphatic pump.

01:37 The lymphatic pump is when you deal with the lymph system in the body.

01:41 The body has lymph everywhere.

01:43 It kind of bathes the tissues, bathes the body but sometimes it starts to pool or get caught in diaphragms where it doesn’t go through easily.

01:53 And we try to manipulate it by easing up motion, helping motion, and helping a person’s lymph system return and get redistributed.

02:03 I’m going to start by showing you a thoracic/lymphatic pump and that’s basically where you find a position in the chest where you may have a coagulation of lymph and you just generally push on it and help the lymph flow.

02:18 And it’s usually a rhythmic helping of the lymph in the body flow.

02:23 Then you check the diaphragm.

02:25 There are 7 diaphragms in the body.

02:26 I’m going to check the thoracic diaphragm and the pelvic diaphragm now just to make sure there’s freedom of motion and freedom of flow.

02:38 And if there is freedom of flow, you just massage the lymph to return.

02:43 So we can come and make sure that you get flow of the lymph through the tissues then end up in the periphery.

02:58 That’s the lymphatic pump.