Indigo Wellness Center

Salem Arts Building Open House

Thursday, Dec. 10, 2009
4:30 pm-7:30 pm

Join us at Indigo Downtown for raffles, refreshments and fun throughout the Salem Arts Building (155 Liberty St NE, next to the Reed Opera House).

Fitness Fair: Fitness Together, West

Indigo Wellness Center joins with local health vendors Shakely Green, Bronze Planet, Gallaghers, Life Source and Mill Creek Station for Fitness Together, West Salem’s Fitness Fair and anniversary celebration.

Oct. 14, 2009 from 5 pm -8 pm

Fitness Together
1594 Edgewater St NW
Salem, OR 97304
503.562.9192

Manual Lymphatic Drainage

Manual Lymphatic Drainage

Recently, I attended training in lymphatic drainage. I learned techniques that are very effective ,yet the pressure is very light. It can be as the weight of a nickel, yet no more deep than the weight of your hand. This is because we have lymph capillaries that are very superficial. Using more pressure doesn’t give more results. I can tell you from personal experience that this is a very effective technique! I can also tell you from personal experience to pay attention to your therapists guidelines for after receiving this treatment…. but more on that later.

Lymph fluid flows from the smallest spaces between organs and tissues via lymph vessels, nodes and ducts. Nodes are fantastic filters, containing lymphocytes and macrophages. These destroy viruses, produce antibodies, devour debris, dead cells, and waste. It can even help break down allergens. So, this is the perfect time of year to rev up that immunity with an all natural remedy!

In addition to maintaining a healthy immune system, lymph fluid transports vital nutrients to cells, delivers immune cells, and removes proteins too large to travel through blood vessels. So when you twist your ankle jogging, have surgery (always get a doctors approval of course), are injured in an accident, or like me take a dive on your bike, you get swelling around the injury site. Those big old proteins attract water, causing more edema. That puts pressure on the injured tissues, and can worsen the pain. Why suffer that, when a simple, gentle, non invasive treatment is available?

Our bodies are designed with a muscle to pump our blood, but our lymphatic circulation relies on body actions to keep it going. Activities like stretching, walking and yawning all help drain lymph nodes and ducts. Even something as simple as taking a breath helps this process- inhaling compacts and empties ducts, while exhalation fills them. In yoga so often the focus is on the breath. There are classes that focus completely on the breath. Here is another example of how our breath heals. All of these are great ways our bodies naturally stimulates our lymph system. Exercise significantly increases lymph flow. Yet another reason to move more!

Ok. We have covered the amazing ways manual lymphatic drainage can help us, it is time to hear the precautions. Here comes the personal experience part!

If you are starting to come down with a cold, flu, or any similar illness, you definitely will want to wait until you are “over the hump”. While this treatment generally helps your recovery time, it will “push” whatever you have deep through your system, and it can make your symptoms more intense for a bit. More so when you are at the beginning sates of illness. The duration should be shorter, a lot quite a bit shorter, but you will need to be prepared! By that, I mean you will want to have plenty of fluids before and after your massage. You will also want to allow down time, so your body can heal.

Now normally, you only get between 15 – 60 minutes of lymph drainage in one session. Since we were training and practicing, we each received several hours of it in one day! So that has to be taken into consideration when gauging my down time. I had simple allergies starting and didn’t think I would be affected. I also drank just the normal amount of water before hand. Silly me! I got sick for several days! However, i am someone who is prone to many different types of headaches. Sinus is one of them. I can honestly say that my sinus headaches have been nearly absent since i recovered following the training.

Other things to consider are whether or not you have had any lymph nodes removed, how recent your injury or surgery is, and whether or not you have any condition that you know would be aggravated by massage. If you arent sure, you can always talk to your doctor or myself. If I am not sure, I will contact your doctor.

I have included this technique in several massages, and it is easily incorporated into your regular therapy. You can get your massage that you love, and get a bit of extra benefit!

Kristel Wonderly LMT #11433

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. – The Dalai Lama

I’ve Been Rear-ended! What NOW?

The role of massage therapy in injury

My name is Vicki and I’m a Licensed Massage Therapist. If you come into my office you might be surprised to see my mascot, Murgatroid Bones. He’s my 5 foot 6 inch boy (plastic) skeleton. You’d also see charts on the wall outlining muscle pain referral patterns and medical texts in my bookcase. This is because like a number of massage therapists, I specialize in accident and injury, especially motor vehicle accidents. Several of us massage therapists at Indigo Wellness Center do.

The massage profession is governed by the Oregon Board of Massage. The Legislature has enacted specific Oregon Revised Statutes and the Board has promulgated clarifying rules. Looking at the definition of massage in the law and rules, the possibilities for a licensed therapist’s practice is very broad. You’ll find practitioners in spas giving luscious relaxation massages. You’ll find them in private practice balancing your energy. You can also find them in medical offices and in private practice as allied professionals to physicians in the role of improving soft tissue quality.

Your soft tissue consists of many things including muscles, ligaments and connective tissue. Connective tissue is the most prevalent tissue in your body, and like any other part of your body, it can be injured. Unlike bones, discs and cartilage, soft tissue is much harder to see with the usual tools for identifying injury. You can’t easily test the muscle health like you can blood to make sure everything is in balance. In fact, autopsies on people who have been in auto accidents and died years later from other causes showed injuries from that accident that still could not be seen with X-rays and other testing equipment. If no one can see it, how do you recover from it? That’s where the massage therapist specializing in accidents and injuries comes in handy working with your physician and other disciplines.

Let’s use the auto accident as the example since most of us, at one time or another has had this experience. A large number of soft tissue injuries resulting from auto accidents are self limiting, meaning that you will recover with time regardless of what you do. Sometimes, though, the soft-tissue injury is too much for your body to repair without help. The impact of auto accidents on soft tissue has been studied by researchers who have learned a great deal even though studying tissue on living people is problematic. Because of the potentially serious injuries that can result from an accident, it is important to see your primary care physician or chiropractor if you don’t recover as you expect.

Testing has shown that it is the acceleration when struck and then abrupt deceleration when the car stops (or the seatbelt stops you) that causes the potentially difficult soft-tissue injuries. This is assuming away all the other bad things that can happen in an accident unrelated to the abrupt stopping of the car. It is the over bending of the neck when struck that gives you the “whiplash” or cervical acceleration/deceleration injury (CAD). The term “whiplash” is a bit of a misnomer, since seatbelts can allow injuries and imbalances clear into the pelvis and low back. Slamming your foot on the brake or a death grip on your steering wheel can cause other arm or leg injuries.

Injuries to soft tissue can include minor tearing of the muscle fibers, but biopsies have also shown that about 25 per cent of the time, muscle and other soft tissue are inflamed and bleeding and sometimes ruptured. The connective tissue that encases your muscles can carry the muscle body minutely askew resulting in ineffective use of that muscle. Even the paired muscles between your vertebrae (interspinal muscles) can spasm. The mechanism that causes the soft tissue injuries is complex but the conclusion is that muscles, connective tissue, small blood vessels, lymphatic vessels, nerves and ligaments can be badly injured and it can’t be seen.

Research shows that most people who have been in accidents and sustained minor injuries have symptoms that are delayed for 24 to 48 hours. In addition, most people will recover fully without treatment within 21 days. However, there are many factors that determine how long it will take a person to heal including overall health at the time of the accident, speed and direction of impact, and the person’s daily activities. According to Foreman and Croft, passive therapy, this is therapy that does not include the help of the patient, is less successful than active therapies. The therapist should help you to establish work to do on your own to assist your healing. It is also up to the patient to be well-informed about the injury to understand the importance of participation in the healing process.

Foreman and Croft state that an individual in an accident goes through three identifiable phases of recovery. The first is the “acute inflammatory phase,” the second is the “repair phase” and the third is the “remodeling phase.” The length of time that each phase lasts depends upon many factors including those mentioned above. I have seen untreated accident victims 6 months after their injury whose tissue is still swollen so that it is difficult to touch it without causing pain. Generally, the swelling begins to subside within weeks of the first effective treatment.

The goal of healing in the first phase of the accident is to reduce the inflammation. A massage therapist trained in multiple massage and manual therapy techniques can assist your body in reducing inflammation of soft tissue. At this point, it is difficult for the therapist to palpate the exact injury to your soft tissue, although testing will provide an indication. The body is trying to heal efficiently and in the process it can over react and produce too much of a number of healing byproducts. Massage can help to disburse these byproducts rather than allowing them to remain in your tissue.

As the body moves into the second phase, the repair phase, it becomes more evident where scar tissue is developing. The body may produce too much of a good thing, collagen, as part of the healing process. This creates scar tissue that is important to regaining health, but also can result in rigid soft tissue. Massage therapy can help to increase flexibility of tissue, reduce scar formation as well as the spasms that travel with muscle injury.

Janet Travell, MD, personal physician to John F. Kennedy in the White House, focused on what she called trigger points; that is, painful nodules in a taut band of muscle tissue. These trigger points occur at predictable locations and cause pain in predictable patterns. During the healing process, trigger points more often than not develop in muscles. Recent research has identified the mechanism that causes the nodules and explains their specific locations. Massage therapists trained in addressing trigger points can help alleviate the pain resulting from these muscular supercontractions.

Regaining soft tissue health after an injury is not fast. Injuries can be permanent, although most often they can be satisfactorily resolved. Massage designed to help you heal from accidents is not always comfortable since soft tissue may have developed adhesions (sticking together), scars and inflexibility. Getting the soft tissue to move freely again takes repetitive work. The advantage of a massage therapist, is that an experienced therapist has felt many injuries to soft tissue and can distinguish a trigger point from a spasm, adhesion or scar, or misalignment of soft tissue. The experienced massage therapist can generally know by feeling the tissue whether its health is improving. Few other disciplines spend as much time in close contact with soft tissue injury, how it feels to the touch, how it progresses and what techniques work.

Motor vehicle insurance generally pays for massage when a patient is referred to the massage therapist by a primary care physician or chiropractor. They pay because it helps their clients get well after an accident. If your physician is uncertain of what to include in a referral, the therapist you choose can clarify for the physician or send a completed referral form for the physician to sign.

Each person is different and the massage therapist you choose will depend in part upon you and what you would like to have happen. The therapists at Indigo Wellness Center who treat motor vehicle injuries will bill your insurance for you, thereby taking that pressure from you at a time when fixing your car, rearranging your schedule and healing takes priority.

References:

Foreman, Stephen M. and Croft, Arthur C. Whiplash Injuries: The Cervical Acceleration/Deceleration Syndrome, Third edition, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Philadelphia, 2002

Gerwin, Robert D MD and Dammerholt, PT, MPS, Shah, Jay P. MD, “Myofascial Trigger Points: An Evidence-Informed Review,” The Journal of Manual & Manipulative Therapy, Vol. 14, No. 4 (2006), pp. 203-221.

Rattray, Fiona and Ludwig, Linda, Clinical Massage Therapy: Understanding, Assessing and Treating over 70 Conditions, Talus Incorporated, Ontario, 2000

Author of the article, Vicki McLean is a Licensed Massage Therapist (Oregon License #13067) and Certified Medical Massage Practitioner practicing since 2006. She is sole owner of Indigo Medical Massage, LLC. She specializes in treating injuries resulting from motor vehicle accidents and other accidents and injuries. She is located at Indigo Wellness Center, 3276 Commercial Street SE, Salem, OR 97302. Phone: (503) 910-0983, Fax: (503) 214-8046, e-mail: Vicki@IndigoMedicalMassage.com. To schedule with one of the therapists at Indigo Wellness