What kind of toxins does massage release

In all cases, these toxins must be processed and expelled by your organs to prevent toxicity. If they are not, than they can wreak havoc on your health. At best, a build-up of toxins can leave you feeling lethargic and sore.

At worst, they can lead to chronic illness and disease that do lasting damage to your health. There are many reasons that our bodies struggle to process harmful toxins. Firstly, many are chemical or mineral substances that our bodies are not designed to process like BPAs, mercury, artificial food additives, and hormones, to name a few.

Second, if your organs are not functioning properly or you have some other underlying health condition you will need help removing both foreign and naturally occuring toxins from your system.

Manual massage therapy has long been lauded as an effective treatment for releasing toxins and the reason can be found by looking at the organ with which you are most familiar: your skin. Skin is the largest organ in the body and the one that we see everyday but may take for granted.

Often underappreciated for its complexity, your skin plays a vital role in your circulation and immune health. For millennia, healers and therapists have been using massage to treat illness, increase circulation and promote good health.

As your massage therapist applies pressure to your skin blood flow increases and heat is released. Heating the body moves blood toward the skin to dissipate the heat.

The circulation of blood to release the heat produced by a fever decongests the internal organs. In a similar fashion, the heat generated through manual massage improves circulation, oxygenates cells and organs, and stimulates your immune system. The liver also detoxifies chemicals and metabolizes drugs.

Persistent organic pollutants are chemicals that do not easily break down and can remain in the environment and the body. These environmental toxins can be found in plants and venom, and produced by viruses, bacteria, fungi and protozoa, naturally occurring metals or synthetically manufactured substances such as pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, gasoline, fire retardants and more. These toxic substances are found in the air, soil and water, as well as building materials, home furnishings, cleaning substances, cosmetics and personal care products.

We breathe, eat and absorb some of these chemicals through the skin. Bio-transformation is the chemical change the body makes in chemical substances so the substance can be used or eliminated. Digestion of food is a form of bio-transformation. The liver is the primary bio-transforming organ due to its large size and high concentration of bio-transforming enzymes. The kidneys and lungs are next. The issue with persistent organic pollutants is that biotransformation processes do not efficiently or effectively change these substances into other chemicals that can be eliminated by normal processes, and they become stored in the tissues.

The primary sites in the body for accumulation of persistent organic pollutants are adipose tissue, bone, and the liver and kidneys. This accumulation is implicated in many chronic health issues. Research does indicate that heavy perspiration can help the body eliminate some, but not all, persistent organic pollutants.

Therefore, sweating can be considered a form of detoxification, when it comes to environmental toxins.. Fluid excreted by the sweat glands consists of water containing sodium chloride and phosphate, urea, ammonia, sulfates, creatinine, fats and other waste products.

Regular sessions of induced perspiration can eliminate some of the environmental toxins stored in body tissue. Activities that create sweating are exercise and sauna. Water lost during sweating needs to be replaced by drinking clean water. When the opportunity arises, go ahead and explain that massage does not remove toxins stored in the body.

The body deals with undesirable molecules in many ways. When massage therapists talk or think about detoxifying, they need to be much more specific: what molecule , how it normally works, and how massage or water intake supposedly improves the speed or effectiveness of normal biological waste processing recycling, sequestering, or elimination.

So what are some of the specific possibilities? A poison is literally any harmful substance , and even something safe in typical doses becomes a poison in overdose so you can be poisoned by either lots of water or a minuscule amount of lead. Toxins are technically poisons produced by living things , like venom or metabolic wastes, but informally the word is synonymous with poison. The best specific candidates would be the persistent organic pollutants like pesticides, flame retardants, and polychlorinated biphenyls PCBs, now banned, but formerly ubiquitous in many plastics.

Lead is also an alarmingly common environmental poison and much in the news lately. All of these are indeed found in our environment and our bodies, where they mostly get trapped in fat and otherwise sequestered.

The idea that massage liberates any of these substances is extremely implausible, and is probably not what is meant by the average massage therapist. Any massage therapist who thinks they are squishing environmental pollutants out of your cells and into an excretory pathway like urination is really far out in left field.

There is a more reasonable idea …. Cellular chemistry produces a lot of molecules, with many fates. Technically they are toxins because they are biologically produced, and would be harmful in abnormal concentrations. As in the rest of nature, not much in cellular chemistry is wasted. You want them to go through their normal chemical lifecycle, processed and re-processed. Trying to flush them out would be sort of like trying to improve a car engine by getting rid of the exhaust before it hits the turbocharger.

This is not really surprising. The effect must be minor or non-existent. So presenting lactic acid as some kind of metabolic bogeyman that massage can get rid of is wrong, wrong, wrong on many levels. And any other metabolic waste is even less likely to fit the bill. Not only is massage not a detoxification treatment in any sense, it is actually the opposite: a toxifying treatment.

A little bit. Post-massage soreness and malaise PMSM is a common phenomenon after any strong massage. True rhabdo is a medical emergency in which the kidneys are poisoned by myoglobin from muscle crush injuries.

Myglobin is a true toxin, a biologically produced poison, which we can handle in small doses but start to struggle with in larger doses. Many physical and metabolic stresses cause milder rhabdo-like states — even just intense exercise, and probably massage as well. A rhabdo cocktail of waste metabolites and by-products of tissue damage is probably why we feel a bit cruddy after biological stresses and traumas — even massage, sometimes.

Massage is still worthwhile. But it is, technically, a little bit toxifying — not de -toxifying. Nor can massage get rid of any rhabdo it causes.

PMSM is just an unavoidable mild side effect of strong massage, just like soreness after intense exercise. Even if there are some problematic waste metabolites in your tissues, and even if they can be mostly liberated into the bloodstream … why would drinking a couple extra glasses of water help get rid of them? But your circulatory system is not a simple system of tubes that you can flush out by imbibing extra water. This makes about as much sense as adding fuel to a car to make it go faster.

In fact, fluid balance is quite stable and somewhat independent of modest changes in water intake.