Joining me today is Dr. Perry Nickelston, author of the upcoming book Stop Chasing Pain. Dr. Perry is here today to discuss pain, the lymphatic system, and how emotions can play a role in all of it! Watch as Perry walks me through a lymphatic clearing demo that I am so excited about that I just committed to 30 days of it. I hope you'll join me on this challenge!
More about Perry Nickelston:
Perry Nickelston, DC, NKT, FMS, SFMA, is a Chiropractic Physician with primary focus on Performance Enhancement, Corrective Exercise, and Metabolic Fitness Nutrition and trained fromThe American College of Addictionology and Compulsive Disorders. He is an expert in myofascial, orthopedic, medical and trigger point soft tissue therapy. A member of the Board of Directors and Medical Staff Advisor for AIMLA (American Institute of Medical Laser Application). Dr. Perry teaches healthcare professionals all over the world how to successfully use Class IV Deep Tissue Laser Therapy in alleviating pain. Director of clinical protocols and training for LiteCure Medical Lasers specializing in Myofascial Laser treatments.
Dr. Perry is an expert in movement assessment and diagnosis. Certified and trained as a Functional Movement Specialist (FMS) and Selective Functional Movement Assessment Specialist (SFMA). He uses programs designed to find your source of painful dysfunction and correct it the site of pain improves. A regular columnist for Dynamic Chiropractic, Practice Insights, Chiropractic Economics, To Your Health Magazine, Advance Physical Therapy, PT on the Net, LiveStrong, StrengthCoach, and other industry publications for health and fitness.
- Perry Nickelston's Stop Chasing Pain
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Transcript:
Dr. Pompa:
Pain, chronic pain, lymphatics, and emotions, okay, how does it all tie in? This episode of CellTV ties it all in. You get the best how-to ever. It got me up out of my chair doing all of this. I committed just like I did with the castor oil. I committed to 30 days because I got so darn excited about this and how simple it was, and I believe all of you are going to commit to 30 days of doing this too. I think we’re all going to go beyond. Oh, man, this how-to on how to clear your lymph, which is going to affect your emotions, affect chronic pain, it’s going to affect every aspect of health in your body. Stay tuned.
Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith, and today we welcome Dr. Perry Nickelston, who is a chiropractic physician, speaker on the topics of movement and health, and the author of the upcoming book Stop Chasing Pain. Dr. Perry is here today to discuss pain, the lymphatic system, and how emotions can play a role in all of it. We always love these topics, so let’s welcome Dr. Perry and, of course, Dr. Pompa to the show. Welcome, both of you.
Dr. Pompa:
Thanks for being here Dr. Perry. I appreciate it, especially on this topic, pain. I mean, come on, I mean, this is a big one. Look, I’ve done a lot of shows about pain. You have a unique approach here. I’m a big, huge fan of the lymphatics and how it plays into so many different problems, autoimmune, etc. I always say when people have weird pain, unexplainable pain, think about infection. Something else I say is, if you have infection issues, oh, you probably have lymph challenges, so you can see how this is all going together. All right, we’re going to untangle all of that and even how emotions play into that, which I can’t wait to hear. I’m also big believer in how it all plays together.
I want to start by your story. Like me, I was a chiropractor, and now I’m functioning outside of chiropractor, still with the philosophy that the body has ability to heal itself if we remove the interference. My own challenge, my own sickness took me where I am today. That’s your story, Perry, so tell that story.
Dr. Perry:
Yeah, it sounds like I’m hearing my own story when you’re going over yours. What I’ve discovered is that most of our discoveries in life that take us where we need to be are usually—have some pain and suffering that go along with it, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Dr. Perry:
You start to have a new perspective on something, a different way of looking at something. Often times by not on your own choice, if that makes sense. About five years ago, I think, I just got blindsided with an autoimmune disease. They still don’t have a name for what I have. It was just a lot of inflammation in my body, and then I began to get infections all over the place. My immune system was going crazy. I’d get sinus infections, urinary tract infections, prostate infections, ear infections, all these itises. The traditional medical approach for those infections is usually pharmacology and medication, which sometimes you do need.
Then I just started to need more and more and more and then going on antibiotics and pain medications and eventually some surgical interventions that looking back may have been necessary, but there was several in a row. They just massacred my system even more, and then it got to a point where I could barely function. I actually had to quit practicing and traveling and teaching. The thing that got me the most was the pain, yes, but when my brain started to go, that was the scariest part. I couldn’t put sentences together. I was forgetting things. I had brain fog, fatigue. I was so tired no matter how much I slept, so I had no energy. My body just couldn’t get enough energy to sustain itself much less begin to heal itself.
I was heading fast into some serious neurodegenerative disorders. I mean, I was showing signs of Alzheimer’s, honestly, with how bad I was getting. I knew that I needed some help and focusing on the musculoskeletal system and even the nervous system, which is what I had training in from chiropractic but also studying over the years pain science and neuroscience and the power of the brain and the nervous system, but it wasn’t helping. If it did help, it didn’t stick. In my 27 years, I was always asking why stuff that would help didn’t last and why it didn’t stick. I’ve always been on a search for some kind of answer, and I think that my sickness was delivered to me to discover it, honestly.
Dr. Pompa:
I would agree, the same with mine as well. You know what? What you said there why things don’t stick, my short answer is, oh, you just didn’t get to the cause yet. I did a lot of things that helped me. Okay, I addressed my adrenals. Oh, it helped my energy a little bit temporarily. Addressed my thyroid, helped it temporarily. I did it all, but it was nothing lasting until I really truly got upstream to the cause. It sounds like your story.
Dr. Perry:
Yeah, I’ve always thought, listen, if you give the body what it wants, it’ll tell you quick, fast, in a hurry if you got it right. If you don’t give it what it wants, it’ll tell you that too, and so I don’t believe that it takes months and months and months for people to start to notice a change on what they should be getting. It’s telling me thanks for the attempt, but you’re not on the right track. That’s why with my journey I have a new definition of pain for me. Pain is a deep rabbit hole, right? We’re going to be unpacking that one for centuries, and everybody’s going to disagree on it for centuries. Pain is a request for change. That’s my definition. Pain is a request for change. To me, that means a change in your habits and your behaviors and a change from the standpoint of the clinician of how you’re looking at the body, the way you’re addressing it for the underlying “root cause” or things that added to what happened.
My thought processed with Stop Chasing Pain, the name, was quite educational because I have been teaching people for years that your site of pain is not telling you that’s where your problem is. When I would be looking for what might be causing the pain, I was still trapped in a musculoskeletal framework of the system. Let me give you an example. If you shoulder hurts on—your right shoulder hurts. I would say, well, maybe it’s coming from your left hip. That’s a huge thing for a lot of people to see that connection, but it was still musculoskeletal oriented. I knew that that wasn’t what I needed because I was still suffering, and that’s when I began to study energy systems and different systems of the body, particularly the immune system. My immune system was going—it was maladapted. It was just going crazy.
That’s what led me in to discovering the role of the lymphatic system, and once I came across that, I was really shocked because nobody had ever mentioned lymphatic system to me at all in any role whatsoever in contributing to what my problem was. Then when I thought about it, I’m like you know what? I’ve been in this profession—at the time, this is 22 years. That was few years ago, 22 years. I don’t think I maybe read a paragraph on the lymphatics. I graduated in 1997 from Palmer College of Chiropractic. I don’t remember ever going over the lymphatics because it was all about the spine and the nervous system.
Once I came across this stuff, I was blown away, but the reason I was blown away is because of this. Somebody actually saw me at a workshop. I was trying to study energy systems of the body, how cells heal themselves, and at the time, I was sniffing a lot. Every five seconds I was sniffing. Every two seconds I was clearing my throat, so I had a lot of mucous, a lot of phlegm. My immune system was going crazy. A lot of people were getting upset because it’s very annoying in the class, right?
The lead instructor said, “I want you to come on up because I think I know what your problem is.” I’m like, “Absolutely.” He said, “Come on over. I’m going to check a spot.” He put two fingers right behind the angle of my jaw, below my ear, at the top of my cervical spine right there, and he pressed on the left and on the right. We know that as C1, C2. I screamed. It was so painful. He said, “I think you got a lymphatic system problem.” I remember I went, “Lymph what?”
Here’s the thing. Out of all the years I’ve been pressing in there, I was visualizing C1, C2, and nerves. I wasn’t thinking the largest lymph node in the neck sits there. That’s not what I was thinking, even though it was there all along. He proceeded at that point to physically assess all of my major lymph nodes in the body. There are clusters of nodes that gather together, and there’s primary places that they sit. Atop of the neck is one. Bottom of the neck is another, right at the shoulder joint, in the abdomen, and then in the groin behind the knee. The big dogs we call it.
Every single one was just as excruciating as the other, and I thought he had hands from Satan. I swear it was the worse pain I ever felt. I kid you not. When I stood up, I actually could breathe better than I’ve been able to breathe in months just from the assessment. When you assess somebody, you actually start to move the lymph. You clear the blockages. That night I felt horrific because I started the detoxification process. The next day, I woke up. I still felt like I got hit by a truck. I felt a 25, 30% difference in my energy level, and I’m like, okay, this—there’s something to this thing.
From that point on, I was a man obsessed with learning about this system, and I never looked back. My journey was because of the changes that I had so quickly than I’ve ever had with anything else.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so let’s talk about what you learned, I mean, movement being a part of it. One of the things that you talk about is the simplicity of this fluid system of the body and addressing it with great simplicity, and many times people complicate it. We’ve done several shows on lymph. I can’t wait to hear this and my viewers to hear it. What did you learn?
Dr. Perry:
Just the immense role it plays in your being alive. If that system stops working altogether, you’re dead in about 24 hours, which means it’s sort of important, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you have septic blood in 24 hours. I would agree.
Dr. Perry:
Yeah, it’s really important for people to realize what it does. It’s part of your immune system, a significant part of your immune system, and your immune system is designed to just kill things. That’s its job and to keep you alive. Most of that immune system strength is going to come from your gut. As you know, 70 to 80% depending on your resources come from your gut, and then it just so happens that the majority of your lymphatic system lives in your gut. It’s the first system to greet anything that crosses the gut that’s not supposed to be there, so the lymph kicks into gear.
The lymph is the sewage system of your body. It’s designed to remove everything you don’t want in there like viruses, bacteria, toxins, parasites, fungus, cancer cells, even your own cellular metabolic waste, so the cells that you have healthy just dying naturally every day and even from doing things like training, that metabolic waste has to get out. If it does not get out, it stays inside you, and then you become more toxic to yourself, basically. It ties into the immune system, but it’s a significant component, the second part that I call it of your cardiovascular system. Your heart and your veins are beholding to how well the lymphatic system works. The lymph dumps directly into the venous, vein system of the body, so your vascularization and your blood flow, the ability to deliver the actual nutrients and oxygen you need to tissue is going to be beholding to how well the lymphatic system itself works.
That’s why I came up with the analogy of body aquarium. When I started to explain this system, it’s very overwhelming, and people can just glaze over really fast. I just use the analogy of, if you have a clean fish tank, envision the water in the tank as the water in your body. In order to keep that tank nice and clean and pure and for the fish to thrive and survive, you need a filtration system, and that’s the lymphatic system. If that system works well, then the tank looks great, and fish can have the potential to thrive. If that system does not work well, then the water in the tank slowly begins to turn, and we know what it looks like. It’s green. It’s got algae. It’s got fungus. It’s got decreased oxygen. It’s gets biofilm.
The fish begin to die and get sick. You see them in the water like this (gasping). They can’t breathe. I’m like, well, the fish are your cells, and your cells can’t breathe if they’re living in that toxic water, and then what we do in medicine is we replace the fish. We replace the water. We try to do everything to the tank. I’m like why don’t you just look at the filter system? If you fix that, then all the other stuff, then you can take air. Maybe you need to care of those. If you don’t take care of the filter system, here’s the thing that I learned. You don’t stand a chance in hell of reaching your full potential.
That was the answer that I was looking for. You hear this phrase all the time that it’s epigenetics. It’s the environment that kicks off the genes whether you’re going to get sick or whether you’re going to get healthy. There’s a phrase that I came across once that was you cannot get well in the same environment you became ill within. You cannot get well within the same environment you became ill within. I’m like, well, you probably should make sure that the environment that your cells live in 24/7 works great, and the number one system that does that in my clinical opinion is the lymphatic system. Then people just don’t know anything about how to take care of it, or they don’t even know it exists in what I call the real world, but there’s people in medicine that don’t even know anything about it.
Dr. Pompa:
I agree. All right, so let’s talk about how we can clean our tanks. The system doesn’t have pumps. When you buy a fish tank and put a filter in, it has—you plug it in. It has an electric pump. These systems don’t, right? I mean, these systems are just these free-flowing systems. I know movement is really how our bodies are designed to actually move lymph. We know that, somebody laying in a hospital bed, we need to bring someone in and physically move them to, obviously, move the lymph and move the system. Tell us about your methods here.
Dr. Perry:
Yeah, I mean, what the beautiful thing is is that medicine and research is starting to come around. There’s more things being looked at with lymph now than ever before, which is encouraging, especially in relationship to the brain, the glymphatics, which we may get into later. We know that there’s two things that move the lymphatics primarily. One is movement, human movement, so the more you move of yourself, more often, more ways, more environments, the better. Probably the best movement you can do is actually physically walking.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I agree with that, yeah.
Dr. Perry:
Which humans don’t do a lot of, especially now even more so. You’re stuck inside. When you walk, you use your calves, and your calves are considered its own pump-like mechanism, aka a second heart, at least in Eastern medicine. That helps pump the venous blood up from the calves. The contraction of the muscles in the body moves the fluid. Jumping up and down does it great. Trampolining and stuff like that is very helpful for lymph. Just so happens that you have your own trampoline built into your body. It’s called your calf. You can jump up and down on the balls of your feet so movement, but not a lot of people do a lot of movement.
Here’s the thing. If they do movement, they do the same kind of movement all the time. There’s a caveat. If you do the same movement all the time, your body adapts to that type of movement like a callous on a hand, so your tissues will begin to tighten and stiffen up based on your same movement. You can actually influence abnormal fluid flow because you do the same kind of movements too much.
Dr. Pompa:
By the way, my principle of diet variation is based on the same adaptation principle. When you shift and change your diet, the body is forced to adapt, and the adaptation makes you better, your microbiome better. Exercise is always the example I give. Every exercise you start with seems to work, and then it plateaus. Then you start getting diminished results. Change exercise, the body has to adapt. Results go up. This applies to lymph is if you’re doing the same—I exercise all the time. I bet you a lot of my viewers are going I exercise all the time. I exercise all the time. You’re saying, yeah, but you’re doing the same exercises.
Dr. Perry:
Yeah, that’s a big piece of it. It’s just like your immune system. Your immune system becomes stronger and more resilient when you throw a lot of stuff at it.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.
Dr. Perry:
That’s a very common thing that I get too. I have people that are in the fitness world, and they say I move all the time. Shouldn’t my lymph move? I’ll answer that question in a moment. Then breathing, breathing is one. What I mean by breathing is diaphragmatic breathing. I’m sure that you probably talked this with your people a lot of breathing through your diaphragm where it’s this dome shaped muscle that sits at the ribcage there. Then when you breathe in, particularly through your nose, the muscle pushes down, and then when you breathe out, then it comes back up.
It changes pressure. The reason that breathing works that way with the diaphragm is it changes pressure in the body. Pressure moves fluid, folks. Pressure moves fluid. That moves what they call your intra-abdominal pressure, your cylinder around your abdomen, your sides, and your back, like that. That’s only one pressure cylinder. You’ve got another in your pelvis, down in your pelvic floor. You got another one in your thoraxes, in your neck, and in your skull. You have different pressure zones that have to function independently, but they also have to function together as a piston. When you breathe in and out, you have a piston from your head to your tail that drives fluid flow or is supposed to. If you don’t breathe through the diaphragm, which most people don’t because they’ve lost the ability to do it, or they’re under so much stress, tension, and tightness that they breathe through the neck first, the shoulder second, chest third so everything is up here, and then you lose the power piston of the lymph flow.
The largest lymph node in your body and most of the lymph sits in your abdomen. That’s where most of it actually get congested and stuck. It gets stuck at what one call the cisterna chyli, which sits about two inches above your navel, more off to the right-hand side near your vena cava, and it takes all of the lymph from your organs and the lower part of the body. If that guy gets stuck, you get backflow pressure. If you’re not breathing through the diaphragm, you become stagnant in your abdominal region, and then that’s what happens. People don’t breathe through the diaphragm, and they don’t move. Now people always say but I breathe through the diaphragm all the time because I’ve taken all these diaphragm breath courses. I do all this different types of breathing, and I move all the time. I even jump up and down on a trampoline. Why is my lymph still messed up?
Two reasons; one, it’s probably so blocked or so stagnant that that’s not enough to move it anymore. You have to get in there and manually help it move. I’ve got to push it along through manual lymphatic release by hand because it’s too stuck, or you’ve still got an underlying inflammatory issue somewhere. Your lymph just keeps coming back because you haven’t gotten to the root cause of—the lymph issue that keeps coming back is not a lymph problem.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.
Dr. Perry:
It’s still an immune system problem, and if it’s an immune system problem, it’s a nervous system problem. Sorry, that’s my dog. It’s what’s called a neuro-immune response, so your nervous system and your immune system work together. That’s the reason. I always tell people something. It’s a basic tenet from osteopathic medicine. Osteopathic medicine was pretty much the pioneer from Andrew Taylor Still and talking about fluid flow and lymphatics. They said this phrase, and it’s a central tenet of my work. Drainage precedes supply, that you have to drain the lymph and clear the lymph first before you can begin to supply the body with the nutrients and the oxygen that you need or whatever type of therapy that you’re doing.
What does that mean in my world? Lymphatic work always comes first, period. Then I move to everything else.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s so amazing. One of the things I see a lot of is people have major hidden infections and cavitations and root canals unknowingly, and then it just creates this cesspool of lymph. If you don’t clear that lymph, it’s—oh, man, even after you get the cavitations done, the lymph is still now—to your point, still blocked where you need literally some of these manual therapies to free it up.
Dr. Perry:
That’s big, Doc. When you look in here, every tooth has its own lymph channel. Then people have these underlying infections in through here, receding gums, periodontal disease. That’s an underlying cause that drives autoimmune disease or dysfunctional gut issues or if you’ve had a root canal, or a cavitation, or an abscess. Then you go to the dentist, and you think everything’s good. It’s gone, probably not so much. Then it feeds that system from here, and then that’s why a lot of people have this—when I see somebody, I always do a full lymphatic assessment on everyone. No matter what you come in with, if you say, Doc, I’ve got a hangnail that I can’t get rid of, you’re getting a lymph exam. If I’ve got a knee—I don’t care what it is. They get a lymph assessment.
It might not be a problem, but I need to rule it out. I need to check the box. It’s like flying on an airplane. I got to do my checklist to make sure I can take off, and if that doesn’t clear, I need to make sure I work that first. You’ll always usually see stuff around the—underneath the jaw, around the cheeks and nose, right at the side of the temple area there, really, really tender, painful, or the nerves in the face become inflamed because of the lymphatic system issue. Then you get irritation to the cranial nerves at the brainstem, and that feeds sympathetic fight, flight, freeze, freak-out just because your face can’t drain.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, my wife went through this. I wish she were listening, and it all stemmed from a cavitation. That was taken care of, but then she still had this lymph issue, right? It was through here, to your point. This was where you might see it, right?
I want to know a little bit more about your assessment. How do you assess for this? I think people listening would want to know that. Just because you see it here doesn’t mean the blockage is here. Obviously, it’s blocked there, but it could be the tonsils. It could be the—you know what I’m saying? Talk about your assessment and then how that plays into where you would think the problem would be.
Dr. Perry:
That’s a really great question. The lymph goes everywhere, right? I mean, it’s a massive system, and it works on pressure. I go back to the law of hydrodynamics from physics, which basically says this fundamental law: high pressure flows to low pressure, fluid dynamics. I tell people think about a dam of water where there’s a lake. You’ve got all the water on one side. That’s high pressure, and then you’ve got none on the other side. The water naturally wants to go there. I don’t have to teach it how to go there. All I got to do is remove what (the blockage)? Then the water knows where to go.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.
Dr. Perry:
It’s the same thing with the lymph. When I clear the lymph, the body knows where it’s got to go. I don’t have to teach it to do anything. I just got to help it get out of its way. When we think about pressure with the lymph, the most important thing—because I tell people, once you understand this concept, you know how to treat the lymphatic system. It’s so easy. The lowest pressure of the lymphatics where they drain are at the collarbone, right above and into below. That’s the veins, the subclavian, sub, below clavicle, subclavian veins.
The lymph will go back to the venous system. The lowest pressure is at the bottom of the neck. If we know that’s the lowest pressure, now where’s the highest pressure? The highest pressure is at the distal parts, and the top of your head is the highest pressure. The lymph on the top of my head, ultimately, where does it want to drain to (the bottom of the neck, assuming that it can get there)? In order to get to the bottom of the neck, it has to clear all these individual clusters of nodes. It’s almost like little micro filters that look like kidneys that you’re—that come in and kill things that pass through it.
You’ve got one right at the top of the neck, right behind the angle of the jaw. That’s the largest one. You’ve got them underneath your jaw. I’ve got them running down the side of the throat, the deep cervical lymph nodes. They actually drain the ones from your brain. Then I got the ones on the jaw, right by nose, right by my temple, and in the back of my head. If I’ve got one at the—say I’m stuck, and I’m puffy in the cheek. The cheeks get really, really puffy and swollen when lymph is an issue or you have sinus issues. This has to clear the jaw, under the jaw, and the neck to get down, so if I’m blocked anywhere below the cheek, it can’t get there.
When you release the lymph, it’s a law of lymph. You always release it when you’re doing the head from the bottom of the neck up to the top. What that does is it clears pressure blockages from bottom up, so no matter where it is, it can flow past what you just released.
Dr. Pompa:
We had Kelly Kennedy teach my viewers how to pump the lymph and, of course, brush the lymph. Do you recommend those plus the movement, or is there something else that you want to share?
Dr. Perry:
Yeah, that’s a great one. Once you know where they are—I’ll be honest with you. It doesn’t really matter what the hell you do with it. As long as you know that you rub here first, that opens up the channel. What I do is that I don’t brush until I stimulate nodes first. I teach stimulate the node clusters. Then you brush down that way, so brushing to me is last.
Dr. Pompa:
She agreed with that. She said that you pump them first, and then brush them. Same thing, she said clear here first.
Dr. Perry:
Right, you always clear there, and then when you do the rest of the body, it’s the opposite. I’ve got high pressure in my hands, and I’ve got high pressure in my feet. The highest pressure is in your feet. That’s why you get swollen feet and ankles when you’re flying on a plane. Fluid has to fight gravity to get there, so it settles there. Then everything in my foot has to go up to the bottom—think about that distance. That’s a huge distance.
Now, when I talk about clusters, you’ve got—say I’ve got the neck here. Then I’ve got behind my sternum and along my spine. Then I go down to the abdomen where the largest lymph node in the body sits about two inches above the navel. Then I’ve got the ones that are in my lumbar lymph nodes that sit along the lumbar spine and go sideways down into the groin so your right groin and your left groin and then behind your right knee and your left knee. Those are the big clusters.
Let’s say, if I have a swollen ankle on the left-hand side, we know that you need to get rid of that swelling and inflammation, and the lymphatics get rid of swelling. Ice doesn’t get rid of swelling. Lymphatics get rid of swelling. Then you know, okay, where does that swelling got to go? It’s got to go out through the veins. It’s got to go out through the lymph.
What’s the target? It’s the neck, so I got to make sure that there’s nothing blocked behind the knee because that’s the first block it’s going to hit. Then the next block is the groin. Then the next block is the navel. The next block is the abdomen at the cisterna chyli. The next block is behind the sternum.
What I see all the time is that people are stuck at the sternum. They’re stuck in the abdomen. The swelling in the ankle even though it wants to get out can’t, so it resettles back down to the bottom. It gets up, and it says I can’t go any further. I got to go right back down where I was, so you have to clear. This time you go neck down so collarbone down. You never ever start from the foot up, never.
Dr. Pompa:
Here up. Here down.
Dr. Perry:
Correct. I don’t dry brush. Say, for instance, get on the foot and dry brush up. You can, but I’m going to be dry brushing you up into a possible block. The biggest blocks that people have that they don’t know that they have are in the abdomen and in the groin and in the sternum, so I have to clear those first. Then I brush after that. If I clear the blocks, then the lymph already knows where it needs to go.
Dr. Pompa:
Wait a minute. You’re saying, like we did here, you pump these areas, stimulate these on up. You’re saying, okay, now we do it the opposite. We go here. We go in this area, into the abdomen two inches up, all the points you’re saying. Is that correct?
Dr. Perry:
Right.
Dr. Pompa:
Then you brush in the same order?
Dr. Perry:
No, then you brush from bottom up.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, that’s what I thought. Then you brush from the feet up because you freed them.
Dr. Perry:
Yeah, we know where it needs to go. It’s a term for—I call these node roads. There’s roads of lymph, and they come together in these big clusters of nodes. You’ve got 6 to 700 lymph nodes in the body depending on the resource that you look at. Either way, it’s a big number. First of all, one-third of that number is from the neck up, so I want you to just think about that. One-third is from the neck up. Lymph is probably going to be a little bit of an important role for neck and brain health. Then the rest are going to develop in clusters.
Nature’s pretty smart. She puts most of the clusters around the big joints of the body that need to have a lot of mobility, shoulders, hips, knees, trunk, so if you move those, you pump those. For me, I’m going to check the sternum and the abdomen for sure because they’re the two biggest places where people get stuck, but nobody ever looks there. Here’s why. Nobody ever has pain there.
Dr. Pompa:
How do you pump the—when they’re behind the sternum? I mean, it’s easy to hit some of these abdomen spots, the navel. Two inches above, a little to the right is the cisterna, right? I mean, those are pretty easy to—just to mobilize in there. How do you do this area?
Dr. Perry:
It’s the very same premise. Just along the sternum itself is supposed to be hard because it’s a bone. You’ve got fascial attachments there that can be tight for people as well because it bridges right pec to left pec and then neck to pelvis. It gets very puffy and swollen in there when you’ve got congested lymph, and it gets very congested in between the ribs as they articulate to the sternum. You have to go in between the rib spaces next to the sternum as well as the sternum to free it up. Then depending on your skillset level, you can do, one, what they call thymus thumping, which is I’m just going to pound my sternum with my heel of my hand or my fist, so I’m giving myself pretty much like CPR. If you’re a clinician and you can do it and you’re experienced with movement, you can do mobility resets to the sternum that are based on osteopathic medicine. Just based on pressure, I can go here, and I can do what’s called a lung pump where I can actually pump the lungs at this place, right below the collarbone. I give CPR to below the collarbone. Then that’s going to free up that motion here because that’s where it gets stuck.
Then when I go down to the abdomen, then I’ll go and I’ll check around the navel is a huge one. Then about two inches up, I’ll go in there, and I’ll dig deep. I’ll press in several inches where I need to go. Then I’ll work that region as well, and most people are astounded at how painful those areas are. They’re not supposed to be painful.
Dr. Pompa:
Right, no, exactly. I would argue that that plays so much into a gut that won’t heal. Obviously, it’s tied directly into—yeah, those channels, lymphatic channels, are connected right into the gut in that area.
Dr. Perry:
This is what’s really important for people to understand is that, when you look at the lymphatics system—I’ve studied a lot, particularly in relationship to cancer. I had cancer 18 years ago. I had thyroid cancer, so they took out my thyroid gland and a significant amount of nodes in my neck at the time, which I really didn’t think about at the time. My body was sick when I had cancer. I had the procedure done, but I was still sick. You follow? Then I just manifested it years later with an autoimmune disease. This region in here, when they took those out, I was more vulnerable.
When you look at cancer, they’ll tell you that the entire lymphatic system is only as strong and resilient as its weakest and most vulnerable lymph node, which means that if I have one lymph node of the body—and they look at it more from the one that has the metastasis in it. That’s the one where say I have every lymph node feels good, but I got one swollen one. Let’s say behind my left knee. All the other ones are good. When you go through the lymphatic system, that lymph node makes the entire system vulnerable in its ability to flow. The lymph node behind your knee can be the contributing factor to the neck pain that won’t go away because everything is interconnected, and that fluid system is one. It’s not separate. Plus, I know that that lymph node will influence venous flow and arterial flow, so then that’s going to make a difference on the ability for me to get the nutrients and the oxygen that I need to whatever tissue that I have. That’s why you have to do a full body lymphatic system on everyone. You can do isolated treatments for a swollen left leg, for instance, but I want you to make sure that you look at them all.
The body is very interesting. First of all, it’s under no obligation whatsoever to make sense to you. It can do whatever the hell it wants to do. You may expect that if your left leg has pain that you would see the lymph on the left side to be the worst. No, it doesn’t have to. It could be on the right-hand side, so I usually will do the whole system reset on someone before I begin to go isolated in that region. It’s really important that we remember. There’s a phrase that I use all the time. It’s where no system in the body ever works alone. It never gets injured alone. It never heals alone.
When I’m pressing on the cisterna chyli two inches up from my navel, I have to tell—first of all, anybody who presses here probably doesn’t even think I’m pressing on a lymph node. They don’t even think that the system is there. If you could just know that it’s there, that’s a win. Then you got to remember, holy cow, it sits right next to the vena cava. It sits right next to the aorta. If that’s backed up, it’s going to influence blood flow, which if I’m backed up there, it’s going to change blood flow everywhere, even in my brain. Then I’ve got nerve clusters that sit there. Behind there, you’ve got these ganglion, these plexus of ganglion. You’ve got the celiac plexus, the superior and inferior mesenteric, and then the hypogastric below that, so I’ve got four big circles of nerves that are the waystation for everything coming in here. If you’ve got swelling, when I touch in your belly like that, I’m going to tell you right now those relay stations are not working as well as they should, and that can send you pain anywhere, particularly near the back.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, exactly. That’s the connection. Two questions, how do you—I asked the question earlier. We kind of answered it. To be more specific, assessing them, are we just looking for puffiness, pain on touch, or is there something else?
Dr. Perry:
There’s a couple of things. You’ll have a clinical presentation with lymphatic. I have this joke. How do you know you have a lymphatic system problem? You’re breathing. That’s how I know you got a lymphatic system problem. Another joke is that, if you’re standing in front of me asking me for help, it’s probably an issue there. The lymphatic system can have a couple different presentations. It can have one where you’re puffy and you’re swollen. That’s the one where somebody visibly looks puffy.
When you look back at old pictures of me, I looked heavy in the face. I had edema. I had inflammation. I looked puffy, and I had extra weight. When you become very toxic, you’ll put on body fat to try to—as a way to protect you from toxins. You’ll have weight. You’ll be puffy. You’ll be swollen.
When I touch around the lymph node clusters, it will be painful. It will feel puffy. I will actually see skin changes. It can be red. It can be blotchy. You can have petechia. I can have changes to the skin where you don’t get blood flow back, so capillary refill is compromised.
I’ll usually go by your reaction. I’ll know if you like it or you don’t like it. I know one thing. If you got pain somewhere, you got a lymph problem. If you got pain, you got inflammation. It may not be inflammation there. It’s probably inflammation in your brain, which is why you’re perceiving pain when I touch there.
You’ve got that presentation. Then I’m going to look at your history. I’m going to see the things that you’ve checked off, particularly maybe like digestive history, sinus history, people who have allergies a lot, prone to allergies and asthma, very big lymph problems. Those lay down antibodies. They lay down this puffiness type of thing to protect you. Fluids and mucous and stuff are protective. That’s what was happening to me, so I was a big giant puffball.
When I got my lymph under control, I lost 30 pounds of edema, inflammation, and swelling and body fat in a month like that, and I just leaned out. Then you have another presentation where the lymph is not puffy or swollen, but it’s breaking down because your system is catabolic. That’s a person who is not puffy or swollen. They’re more broken down. The lymph is an issue, but it’s not swollen per se. The supporting structure is called the anchor filaments there are beginning to breakdown. Then the body begins to eat the support structure away, and then it can’t control fluid dynamics. The body is eating away the tissue because you’re stuck in a catabolic sympathetic dominant mode.
You’ll have a lymph issue, but you’ll have two different presentations for it. You’ll treat the lymph the same way, but your ultimate thing that you’ll need to do will be slightly different because each one of those things is a catabolic response and an anabolic response. That means you’ve got a different immune system response that the lymph is reacting to, so you have to ultimately have a restoration program that is the same but different, if that makes sense.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but you would clear the lymph the same, correct?
Dr. Perry:
Yeah, so you always want to clear the lymph, but you have to be careful here. I’ve learned a few valuable lessons is that just because you can clear all the lymph at one time doesn’t mean you should. There’s different ways of being aggressive with the lymph in relationship to pressure, time, depth, speed. There’s many variations. I learned a long time ago that, if you do too much to someone, the system can’t handle it. Most of the time it can’t because people may be poor detoxifiers to begin with. It could be a genetic issue. Probably a liver issue for sure. The system is so overloaded and so sensitive that, if you do too much, you’ll actually send them into what’s called a retoxification reaction where they become really sick for weeks, if not months, and their healing slows down.
When I have somebody that’s been sick for a while or I know they’ve got an acute exacerbation of an autoimmune disease, I work the lymph, but I do it in stages. I need to tiptoe into the system so that it can tolerate what I’m doing to it. The one thing that I learned is that, when you assess the primary lymph node regions of the body, which we teach—I’ve gone over a couple of them. There’s more. Just the very act of putting your finger there, applying pressure, and moving side to side, the assessment is the first treatment. Because it’s so light of just pressing there, it’s not an onslaught of a detox. The assessment usually will make somebody feel a lot better.
Here’s the cool thing, Doc. All of those lymph nodes live near major vascularization nerve points and pulse points. If you’re having tissue tightness and restriction, you’re going to reduce lymph flow because tight tissue does not allow optimal fluid to move. When I work these areas, I’m also increasing vascular flow, so you’re going to notice that your body feels really, really good. One, I freed up your ability to get blood and oxygen to capillaries, but I’ve also freed up the venous blood, the blue blood that’s taking out toxins, particularly carbon dioxide and metabolic waste. That’s the biggest system that does it. The lymph helps that, but that frees up.
I’m doing it over areas of the body that most people have never ever physically had touched before. Nobody ever thought to look there because it doesn’t have any relationship to their presenting complaint if you come at it from a musculoskeletal perspective. If you come at it from a systemic full-body fish tank perspective, you realize that you have to take care of the tank before you begin to take care of the stuff in the tank.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more. Then how long do you spend on these points? You said partly, in the first time, you’re just assessing them, and then you progress to the maximum. How long would you take to rub these points out?
Dr. Perry:
Yeah, for me, it’s really not about time per se. It’s about variation and variability of what you do to it. I change up. The techniques that I teach are a blend of Eastern medicine and Western medicine. I do a lot of shearing, which is tissue shearing back and forth. It’s one of the best ways to increase—influence nerves and vascular structures. I do slapping and tapping where you hit. That’s based in qigong and martial arts and stuff that’s been around for centuries and then pressure depths and speed. I’m actually tying into when I teach this work of affecting different nerves in your body and how you’re brain and your nervous system respond to pressure. I’m working the lymph, but I also want to work the nerves. I want to work your body’s perception of pressure and perception of pain based on stimulation, so I’m actually affecting your nervous system greatly.
It’s not so much about time and duration. Here’s the thing. People are so worried about doing something wrong that they get stressed about it. I’m like, first of all, that’s probably why you’re sick. You got too much stress. Just lighten up a little bit. Then the other one is they get so obsessive-compulsive disorder on which way they’re pulling lymph that they’re going to pull it in the wrong direction. Trust me; you ain’t going to pull it in the wrong direction. The lymph knows where it needs to go as long as you know the major block points.
If you pull it to the left, it’ll go to the right if you’ve cleared the node the right way. People don’t do something because it’s too complicated, so I had to go from there. The assessment first is the reset. Then I go by how did you feel? The answer determines what I do next. I felt really awesome. I had a lot of energy. I felt great. Then that means, one, you can repeat that if you would like to. Maybe you just spend a little bit more time on that point now and apply a little bit more pressure because that’s going to be a little more of an aggressive release. Then I might do that.
If somebody says, wow, I mean, I just—I really had a headache. It was a lot for me. It was tough. Then I don’t have you do it again until you begin to feel a little bit better. It might take a couple of days. Then you can do the same thing. I’ll say, okay, now you know what? Just go a little bit lighter, a little less time, and then see how you do that way.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, makes sense.
Dr. Perry:
Then I can move into other stimulation, and then I teach this thing. The first fundamental thing that I teach is called the big six. Everybody gets the assessment, and then I teach everyone the fundamental big six. Those are the big node roads that you absolutely have to clear. This comes before any other lymph recess, and it’s very simple. I’ll tell you what the big six are. The big six, number one is always at the collarbone, so you release there. Then I tell people—the way I have them do it is you just put your hand there, and you rub back and forth ten times over that region. They go how hard? I’m like, yes, that’s the answer. If it hurts, don’t do it, but see if it feels good.
Then depending on your sensitivity level, if you’ve got chronic fatigue syndrome, you’re hypersensitive, you might not be able to do the next step. Then I actually do a tapping technique. The tapping technique is actually very powerful because it stimulates what we call Pacinian corpuscles at the skin that attach into the brain. Then you’ll put your hand over there, and you’ll tap ten times right there. Then that’s the reset. Then you do the other side. You rub ten times, and then you tap five.
It’s okay if you do it five times. It doesn’t make you a bad person, and your lymph won’t explode. You’re good. They say, Doc, can I do it 15 times? I’m like what do you think my answer is (of course you can)? I just want you to know that’s a technique. I want you to understand the concept. The concept is clear this one first.
Now, the second one is right at the top behind the angle of the jaw, below here. Then what you’re going to do is take your fingers, and then you can rub up and down there like ten times. Now, this one you have to be careful because you can tap, but I want you to not tap too hard. You can just rub if you want to, but then you tap that region ten times as well.
Then you’re going to go into the shoulder joint. Where the pec joins the shoulder, right here, it’s called your pectoral axillary lymph nodes. This is the one that gets blocked up, especially with women who have breast issues. You take your hand and just spread your hand out, like a big giant brush on your hand. I want you to rub your pec and right into that armpit ten times, and then I want you to take your whole hand and slap that region ten times. The first thing they say to me is, Doc, this is so simple. This can’t do anything is what they say. I’m like that’s why it works.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right. I love it. I think it’s great.
Dr. Perry:
Then you go to the other side. The one thing we need to know is that, in the drainage thing—you hit it ten times. When you look at how the lymph drains, it’s important to know that the—I’ll say this before we go to the other ones. The right side of the head front and back, the right neck, the right arm, the right torso, and the ribs to the back, that drains to the right side of the neck, here. The rest of the body drains to the left side of the neck. Both feet go to the left side of the neck, so the left side of the neck usually has the larger of the issues of the two so now that you know where fluids flow.
We’ve done one at the collarbone, two at the top of the neck, three at the shoulder. Then we go down into the abdomen, and the abdomen, I still keep it light in the beginning. Then, for this one, I’m going to stand up so people are watching. Then you’re going to place one hand on your navel, one hand above that, so I’m covering my abdominal region here. I’m going to do the same thing. Now, I don’t care which way you rub. You can do your hands up and down. You can do side to side individually. You can do circles. You just do ten times, and then you’re going to do your slaps.
Now, when you do your slaps, you’ve got two options. You can use both hands and go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Why is that helping? That’s vibration, or you can do this. Here comes some math. I can do one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. I can go to 20. That’s ten and ten, whatever one you want. Now, this is now going to flow towards what (what I just released up here)?
Then I’m going to the groin. Now I’ve got the crease of the groin right here. You can see me. There’s the crease. I’m just going to give everybody a warning. I really want you to be careful where you hit here. I’m going to go across the crease, and it doesn’t matter if you go up and down or with it. That’s the inguinal lymph nodes, and they’re going to take the drainage from the gluts. Then do your hits, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven eight, nine, ten. Now, this groin is one of the most important areas for vascular flow in the entire body, right here at the groin, and it’s usually restricted. Now, the groin is going to flow towards what (what I just cleared in the abdomen and what I just cleared in the neck)?
Then last one is going to be behind the knees. You’ll either need to sit or bend at the hips. Don’t bend at the back. Bend at the hips. Then I want you to get your hands behind the knees, and when you rub, I want you to go behind the knee, below the knee, and above the knee. Get the whole big space. Then I want you to do your ten slaps right behind both knees, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Then I want you to stay standing. I want you to put your feet about shoulder width apart. I want you to bounce up and down on the balls of your feet, but don’t let your feet leave the ground, just your heels. I want you to bounce up and down like on a trampoline for 20 seconds breathing in and out only through your nose. You can shake your fingers. You can raise your hands over your head if you want. You can do whatever you want, but only breathe in and out through the nose because breathing in and out through the nose moves your diaphragm better than going through your mouth. You just did the fundamental baseline reset that every human being should do every day. Then when you do those…
Dr. Pompa:
Dude, that was awesome.
Dr. Perry:
We move you to second, third, fourth, and fifth options, and then we move to organs.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, dude, that’s awesome. Listen, so where can people find you?
Dr. Perry:
Very simple, stopchasingpain.com has all of our information from the courses, to the videos, to the membership, to whatever. I probably spend an unhealthy amount of time on Instagram, so you can check me out on there on stopchasingpain.com as well.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s fantastic. There was one more question, and we’ll see if you can answer it in just two minutes. How does emotion tie into all of this because that’s a big part of what you do?
Dr. Perry:
Oh, that’s a big one, right? It’s interesting. When you look at Eastern medicine, the emotional center of the body sits right at the cisterna chyli, so two inches above the bellybutton is where you hold the emotional trauma and shock. Think about that. When you are under threat, you flex forward into a fetal position. That’s the fulcrum point, and it also sits right at the [plexi] of nerves that sit there. When you have an emotion in your body, it creates excess tension and stress, and then we know that the excess tension in the body decreases fluid flow, decreases blood flow, which leads to hypoxia, which is decreased oxygen delivery. Then you go then that spiral hole of inflammation.
We know that how you think changes your biology, and emotions are always, in my clinical opinion, involved with chronic pain. That’s what makes us unique as human beings. Pain is all perception and perception is based on emotion, so you have to take that in consideration when you’re working with everyone. When you work in that space between the navel and the bottom of the sternum, you very often will have emotional releases from your client that will happen that they can’t control. It just will happen because that’s where it resides.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s awesome, great stuff, man, and just the fact I got it. I’m going to do it every day. I always commit to things for 30 days and see how I feel, so I’m committing to it. I know Ashley’s committing to it too. I love it. I can’t wait to do it and learn more. Listen, I want to have you back on, and I want to so Step 2. Step 2, we’ll put this—we’ll link this one, and then we’re going to take them to Step 2. Ashley, make sure that happens. Dr. Perry, thank you for being on Cellular Healing TV.
Dr. Perry:
Thank you very much, Doc.
Ashley:
That’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode, which was brought to you by Fastonic Molecular Hydrogen. Please check it out at getfastonic.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv, and please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, or sharing the show with anyone who may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.
