To understand what this massage aims to do, you first have to understand to lymphatic system. If you haven’t heard of the lymphatic system, you may have at least heard of lymph nodes.
These are a crucial part of your immune system for many reasons. For one, they contain lymph, a fluid which holds B and T cells, which are the ones responsible for targeting and killing off diseases, respectively.
This is your body’s primary means of killing off illnesses. The other thing that your lymphatic system does is filter out anything that isn’t supposed to be there. Dead cells, extra nutrients, and diseases are all filtered out of the blood by your lymph nodes.
The clean lymph fluid returns to the blood while all of the unwanted stuff that got filtered out goes on to get flushed out of the body. This is where the lymphatic massage comes into play.
This massage aims to essentially force the body to filter things through the lymphatic system, eliminating any existing threats much faster. The concept is that it’ll clear the diseases out of your system before they’re able to start replicating and causing an actual issue.
While there are many methods that have been tried and true, this method is still fairly new and doesn’t have much actual scientific research to back it up yet. There are studies being conducted to learn more.
All in all, the massage is just accelerating a natural bodily process, and we don’t really know if that’s a good thing or not just yet. It’s highly unlike that this will hurt you, as it’s been shown in some cases to help with things like swelling.
Overall, if you want to try it, it’s not going to hurt you, and many have said that it’s nice and refreshing – not to mention stress relieving due to the relaxing nature of it. However, it shouldn’t be relied upon for immune system improvement by itself. You’ll want to incorporate many different tactics to help boost your immunity to disease and infection.