In this episode, Dr. Jack Wolfson introduces Kelly Kennedy, Executive Director of The True Wellness Center. Kelly talks with Dr. Jack about how the lymphatic system works, its impact on the heart and overall health, as well as the effects of lymph stagnation. Listen in on this great conversation and discover how you can optimize your health through proper lymphatic flow.
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Kelly Kennedy On Lymphatics: The Frontier That No One Is Looking At
Welcome to another episode of the show, where we give you the best information, bring you the best guests, all with the idea of helping you achieve your 100-year heart. I’ve got a wonderful guest with me. Her name is Kelly Kennedy. Kelly, what’s up?
Thank you so much for having me. I am so thrilled to talk to your community.
The topic you’re going to be bringing is all about lymphatics. If you don’t know what lymphatics are, you’re going to learn so much. It could be a secret bio-hack to help you achieve health and wellness. Let’s talk about Kelly. Like many who enter the world of biological and energetic healing, Kelly Kennedy has had her own traumatic experiences that stimulated her to find another approach to health.
That’s what I would say, too, Kelly is that again, as a lot of the best people, either they suffered personally or close family members who did. In my case, close family members suffered and seeing sickness all around me. She started her training more traditionally when she was at Cornell University with a desire to be an allopathic medical doctor.
That seems to be a common theme as well. People were on their way to go into medical school or even in medical school and said, “This isn’t right for me.” In one particular year, she was faced with her own health challenges and the premature passing of her father. These experiences confirmed what Kelly intuitively knew within her bones that good health was not restored through prescriptions.
After many years of building a health and wellness practice based on bioregulatory medicine, Kelly is now paving the way for a new wellness system to blossom. You can find Kelly in a lot of different places. She helps people at The True Wellness Center in North Wales, Pennsylvania and in Bluffton, South Carolina. You can find Kelly virtually at NotMedsGlobal.com. She’s on YouTube, Instagram and got an incredible podcast called The Beats with Kelly Kennedy and many other things going on. With that being said, Kelly, that’s a pretty impressive bio and story. Tell me more about, if you don’t mind, some of your health issues and what happened to your father.
It’s funny because I don’t listen to my bio very often anymore, and listening to it again, reinforces why I do this. It’s so nice to have that reminder. I grew up in a family with chronic illnesses. My father had Hodgkin’s disease. He had cancer seven times and that’s why I want to be a doctor. I don’t want to get cancer. Nobody could tell me how not to get cancer and if it was hereditary at the time or not. We didn’t know much about Hodgkin’s disease back then. I was like, “Maybe if I become a doctor, I’ll figure it out.” In my first semester at Cornell, I was in a car accident and left with a couple of compressed vertebrae. I lost about two and a half inches in height.
I have a twelve-inch scar on my head, was scalped in that accident and lacerated my spleen. At twenty years old as a collegiate rower, living now on painkillers and muscle relaxers, one month later, my father had his first stroke. Five months later, he had a second stroke. He never got out of the hospital, laid in the hospital bed for five months and died at 55 years old. At the time, I was eleven months out of a car accident, living on painkillers and muscle relaxers and also had horrible allergies my whole life. I was living on pharmaceuticals for that, for my horrible period, allergies, asthma and acne.
By the time this was all said and done, I was on six medications at twenty years old. My father died at 55, and they said chronologically, it was closer to 90 because of all the chemo and radiation he had had. I was like, “They don’t have this figured out.” I’m a collegiate rower, athletic and was told never to exercise again. Basically, to sit in a chair, manage my pain and go to support groups. My 55-year-old father was dead and I was like, “Maybe there’s another way.” I started to research for my own personal health because I didn’t want to live on painkillers, muscle relaxers and managed pain for the rest of my life.
I saw everything under the sun, from hypnotherapists to orthopedic and pain specialists, acupuncturists, chiropractics and everything in the middle. That’s when I discovered this whole energetic world and met the gentlemen who eventually became my husband and was the first energetic person who muscle tested me. He did some emotional work and made a change in my pain.
I didn’t understand how he did it. I knew that I never wanted my pain to come back. How did you do it as I was weaning off of Vicodin and Flexeril and his answer was energy. My answer, I have a very G-rated podcast, Dr. Jack. I don’t know what your podcast is like. I was definitely like, “What the blank did you do and how do we make sure it doesn’t come back? What the heck are you talking about with energy?” I didn’t understand what energy was.
I was more physical medicine-based. I understood that, but I didn’t understand this energy field. We started studying in Switzerland at the Paracelsus Biological Medicine Clinic with Dr. Thomas Rau and then a bunch of his colleagues. It’s expanded over the last twenty years to understand the terrain and the biological medicine field and look at the dental piece and the lymphatics. I had my scar helped and my lymph work done.
I found this guy and he told me it was energy. I did not understand what he meant, but I said, “I’m not going to leave you until I figure it out.” It was about ten years later we were introduced to this group out in Switzerland that had the science of terrain medicine that explained this energy behind what this was all talking about. I’m very much like a tangible fact-based evidence person. I was raised Catholic and it never made sense to me because I couldn’t touch what they were talking about.
When I got into this, my healing happened, and I couldn’t explain it. The only guy that could explain it said, “Energy.” I was like, “What are you talking about? I know what ions are around the nucleus, but what are you talking about?” It took ten years for us to be introduced to the outfit in Europe that had the science behind this energy, this terrain medicine, biological approach. That’s when I became a kid in a candy store.
There were microscopes, regulatory testing and all this empirical base data prior to blood work. It’s talking about more of the regulation of the body, the sympathetic, parasympathetic and ability of the body to heal itself, that I started to understand the science and became like, “I’m an avid student. I want to read, see and learn more.” I want to go to every medical conference I can in Europe so we can learn more about this.
I was already well and felt great. I had no symptoms at that point, but we were plagued with all these clients that were chronically ill with chronic pain. I didn’t have a great way to help them. My husband was helping them in certain ways with emotional pieces, nutrition and the stuff he was doing. I didn’t know how I was going to help him. I started doing regulatory testing, and literally, everybody showed their lymphatics were clogged. They were trying to detox or get their amalgams out, but they couldn’t tolerate it because they felt so symptomatic and sick.
I started to look at this lymphatic system and was like, “That’s the space around the cells?” That’s the extracellular matrix. That’s the space where all the junk is. That is our trash can. Everybody’s got to take out their trash. That’s how I became the “Lymph Queen” several years ago. This is the frontier that nobody’s looking at and it’s so important because it’s a circulatory system. We got to look at how the junk has taken on the body because I firmly believe at this point, our job as an organism is to make sure that the toxins go out faster than they can come in. That’s our job.
Our job is to make sure that the toxins go out faster than they come in our bodies.
If you can break down the lymphatic system, without us having the anatomy chart up here, we can talk about how the arteries supply through the blood and nutrients to the body and the veins, bringing back waste to be disposed of from the lungs and the arteries. We dispose of waste through our gut, kidneys, skin, but it’s like this unsung hero is that lymphatic system. Give us a good visualization of what the lymphatic system is and what it means for that to function appropriately.
From the top of our head to the tip of our toes, we have lymphatic vessels and nodes. Much like our circulatory system, it’s highways that travel throughout the body. The average adult has between 600 and 1,000 lymph nodes, which is a pretty large variance between 600 and 1,000 because everybody’s body size is different. Nodes are mostly concentrated around our joint area. Our neck, arms, shoulders, wrists, knees and hips. Essentially the way I think about it is because I live in the Philadelphia area and we have high congestion of our traffic here. You can think about the lymphatic system as the highways throughout the body and the nodes are the toll booths. If a toll booth is closed, there’s no traffic going through it.
You can have all the proper vessels, but the nodes themselves, if they’re not working, there’s no traffic going through it. The majority of our nodes are in our neck and gut. The ending nodes are right here above our clavicles. They drain them into the heart and then the heart circulates them out. It expands out to alimentary organs. You were talking about the liver, kidneys, lungs and skin. We excrete out our toxins after the heart does its job of circulating them through the lungs.
It has blind-ended capillaries that are one-directional. These highways are more like conveyor belts that only go in one direction. All the traffic is moving in one direction. They collect all the trash. They open up at one like a flower and they collect all the extra fluid and not only proteins, fats and nutrients, but our toxicants and pathogens travel throughout these vessels. The vessels, like these conveyors, move up to the node. The node is like the toll booth, the door that it needs to go through.
We have twice as much lymphatic fluid as we do blood twice as much. When that fluid is collecting all that, it gets up to the node, the node’s job is to identify what’s in there. Is that a gas we keep? Is that a toxicant we get rid of? Do we need to create a macrophage, a white blood cell for this toxicant, allergen, or pathogen? It produces the proper white blood cell, the attacker, the killer cell. It translates that throughout the body.
What we have found a lot of the vessels are working, but the nodes are closed. We’ll talk about why. In a perfect system, though, essentially, you’ve got twice as much fluid as blood circulating throughout the whole body on these conveyor belts going up to the nodes. The nodes identify the pathogens, toxicants, nutrients, gases and it continues to circulate throughout the body.
It takes all of it, dumps it into the cardiovascular system. The cardiovascular system, which you’re so brilliant at the natural heart doctor extraordinaire, takes all that and circulates it throughout all the organ systems. We pee, poop, sweat and breathe out our toxins. I would postulate that we bleed for those women out in the audience that science has not proven this yet, but I do believe that soon we’re going to see that the prostate and the ovaries are all part of the lymphatic system. That’s my theory, not proven in science, Kelly Kennedy’s theory from doing lymph work for several years.
Kelly, you shared the story of your father and Hodgkin’s. Certainly, my experience with Hodgkin’s as far as the diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and a lot of those, was heavily skewed towards young men having chemotherapy, but most radiation. Radiation in the center of the chest and then all of those men invariably, twenty years later, were left with the effects of the radiation, which is one of the many reasons why I’m against any form of radiation, CT scans, nuclear, studies, all these radiation-based testing.
What happens is that all those people wound up with coronary artery and valvular heart disease. When you damage all those tissues with that radiation, Kelly, how much does that impact the lymphatic system? Does that cause sclerosis of the thoracic duct and some of these other lymphatic drainage points? Before you answer that, I want to remind everyone who’s reading. Everything we talk about pertains back to the heart in this particular show. Everything we talk about pertains to everything, but whatever your cardiovascular issue is, and you’re reading this, I can assure you that what Kelly and I are discussing and the lymphatic system definitely will be part of your healing strategy.
That’s one of the reasons I was so excited to align with you because there are not many cardiologists that understand the world in which we live, our terrain medicine and biological medicine. I have always felt that a heart doctor, cardiologist or cardiothoracic surgeon knows more about lymphatics than any other subspecialty because the lymph and the cardiovascular system work hand in hand.
The Starling Principle proved to us a few years ago that we have now discovered through science that it’s no longer the understanding of the medical community that the venal system is where we excrete our toxins. They now have verified that 80% of our toxicants move through the lymphatic system and they have to work together. If the heart stops, we’re done. We know that. We need to maintain our heart health.
From doing heart rate variability testing that I’ve done for several years, I do a Nerve-Express Test, which was designed by a cardiologist in Russia by the name of Dr. Alex Reftine. He uses it to train Navy SEALs and athletes. It’s a health detection, not a disease finder. It’s extreme because he’s a cardiologist and put all these parameters in. I’ve learned his test for years. Several years ago, I started looking at it and going like, “Why are the triathletes in here, the IRONMANs, their heart rate variability sucks? I don’t understand it.” Their chronic trophic and vascular recovery was absent.
I would do one lymph session, put them back on the heart rate variability and all of a sudden, they’d have all this cardiovascular health. I’m like, “They didn’t exercise or do anything. They just move their lymph.” I started to go, “That’s a big piece of this.” If somebody comes in and has a heart problem, we got to back it up and go upstream a little bit. What’s dumping into the cardiovascular system is always my question.
The lymph fluid should be thin like water, fluid gets thicker with sedentary lifestyles, Wi-Fi, improper food, acids from improper thoughts and emotions, which is a huge component to lymph, which we need to talk about, from metals, chemicals and scars on the physical body. These are the things that make the lymph thick instead of thin.
If I’m dumping thick, jelly-like fluid through the cardiovascular system, it’s going to struggle to get through. If I thin that out by pumping the lymph and making these conveyor belts move faster so it gets up to that door and that door is now open. The car can go through if you’re following my analogy. What will happen is the fluid that the heart is now circulating is better and easier for the heart to manage. It looks like they have better heart health when they have better lymph health because you cannot separate these.
It’s like separating mind and body. “We work in the mind-body facility arena,” who’s separating that out? Who’s deciding that I’m working on the body and you’re working on the mind?” I would postulate that every practitioner you ever see is working on mind and body. They might not be conscious of it, but they’re working on it, the bedside manner matters, whether you’re conscious of it or not. If you’re a gruff rough doctor, you’re not going to have the same client base as somebody nice and sweet and awesome and can build that relationship with you. They’re going to get a better result. It’s a little tangent, but I love that.
I often tell people that when they’re interviewing other doctors, you interview them and maybe this is a chiropractor or whether you’re interviewing a doctor, even a lymphatic practitioner, for example, or someone who does massage or other forms of bodywork. When you resonate with someone, you want to work with that person. If you don’t resonate, that’s time again to find somebody else. I do believe that frequency, being on the same page, if you will, having that connection is absolutely critical.
Over the years, since meeting my wife and introducing me to massage. If you go to a hotel and get a massage, you’re like a number over there, as opposed to, if you go to someone who has care and dedication and stuff like that, it makes a huge difference. Kelly, before we get into how we can help people with their lymphatic system, do you have some case studies or ideas? In the cardiovascular arena, how does improving lymphatics help people with coronary artery disease, cholesterol abnormalities, atrial fibrillation or cardiomyopathy? Do you have any experience individually with some of those people? Would you say it’s more of a generalized thing that once you improve the lymphatics, every condition gets better?
If you relax, your lymph moves to detoxify your body.
We deal with plenty of diagnoses. We’re not medical doctors, so I can’t diagnose anybody. I can’t treat anything other than general wellness and wellbeing. I want to back up though before I continue to answer that and talk about the radiation. I absolutely agree with you that radiation causes scarring in the lymphatics and the fascia. My father had a stroke in the right side of his neck, where maybe 5, 6 years previous, they had removed a fair amount of lymph nodes for lymphoma. They had done a skin graft from his leg there to the point where he had an indent. It was concave there at that part of his neck. There was a big scar around it.
That is exactly where they did the radiation. They removed the lymph nodes and guessed where he had the strokes. When I at twenty years old said to the nurse at the time, “Don’t you think he had the stroke right there because the vessels were weakened because of the radiation? Honey, you don’t know what you’re talking about. It has nothing to do with that.” I didn’t know anything about the lymph at that point.
To go back to your question, we don’t diagnose this. We therapize and work with the individual. We help them see the blockades to their healing to make sure they don’t have scars or dental flaws that might block their autonomic nervous system from working. We know that the sympathetic and parasympathetic autonomic nervous system is the only thing in the body that heals outside of mechanistic healing.
You get a knife stuck in your heart. Please send me to the cardiothoracic surgeon and badge up my heart. I’m not going to be doing that with homeopathic and prayers. After that, the chronicity of it, the inflammation, getting rid of the trauma and allowing the body to heal, the body does that. It sends the platelets, white blood cells and all those cytokines and gets everything working and then takes the trash out.
Our job as practitioners, I feel, is to support the body to do that while removing the blockades. When we do that, anything can cause anything. It’s never one thing that causes one thing. It’s typically multi-causational. You walk in with high cholesterol, and it could be diet, stress, lack of exercise or probably a combination of all three of those. Maybe some genetic potentials have been turned on because of lifestyle habits, thought processes and so forth.
When we look at a human being, we’re looking at all aspects of their life. First and foremost, are they getting their toxins out faster than they’re coming in? If we can drain out their toxins, what we find is a myriad of things changes versus their typical circadian rhythms falls into place. We find it most common, “I’m pooping and sleeping more regularly. My cycle has normalized,” if they’re females. These are three indicators that their body’s healthier than before they started doing lymph.
All of a sudden, maybe we support them with supplements or lifestyle changes or whatever. They continue to watch through lab work with our medical doctors and go, “My cholesterol went from 240 to 180 in the last three months. All I changed was I started changing my lifestyle stuff a little bit and draining my lymph.”
Do I have case studies? No. I would love to say that I have the time, energy and resources to sit around all day like I would like to and document everything we’re doing in research. I see clients every day and write content. I’m doing podcasts, but one of my goals for 2023 is to document all that we’re doing and to be able to have the empirical base data.
I test everything. I’m a wonderful scientific skeptic. I can feel something like do therapy and go, “That feels great.” Let’s test the heart rate variability before and after and make sure that I’m getting better. Let’s do live blood before and after to make sure I’m getting better. Let’s do a CRT, Contact Regulation Tomography, to ensure that my regulatory capacities are improving. That it’s not a clinical-like, “That made me feel good,” but it didn’t do anything to my physiology.
With circulation, arterial blood flow, it’s pretty easy to see circulation. Obviously, you can visualize things under ultrasound, do a physical examination, check pulse, pulse pressure, a lot of different things. Are there any objective ways to measure lymphatic function? I’m sure physical examination is a way to measure lymphatic function. Heart rate variability would be another surrogate marker. Is there anything a little bit more definitive? If not, what else are we going to use to show improvement?
I would love better testing for it. I don’t know how we can do it because it’s an ever-flowing system that’s physically moving. Maybe ultrasound, you could probably measure it from that perspective, but that’s how I got into this was a measurable marker for the lymphatics through the Contact Regulation Thermography. Let me explain what that system is.
There are lots of people that do thermograms, which are pictures. A lot of people know it for breast exams. Instead of doing a mammogram, they’ll do a thermography test, which takes a picture of the temperature of the breast. Hotspots are red and proper normal, natural regulation is blue. Green is in the middle of red and blue. You want all blue, no red. It’s looking at the breast.
They now have full body thermography. They’re looking at temperature changes. You want everything to be within a range of proper temperature, but they’re looking at a stacked beam. The thermography tests that we do and employ from Europe are looking at, “Here’s the body at baseline.” We stress the body by cooling it off, having somebody stand in a room naked with their underwear for ten minutes. We retest the points.
It’s a probe that takes the temperature of the dermatomes. It’s 128 points on the body. Every tissue and organ are tested. The body’s cooled off for ten minutes, and those points are retested to see how well every one of those points that relate to organs, meridians, and tissues compensate or regulate for the stress they’re under, which is standing in a room cold for ten minutes.
If the body can do that, you have health. That should give you a shift in temperature from about half a degree to a degree if there’s proper regulation. If it’s more than half, more than a degree, that’s hyper-regulation, a sign of allergy toxicity. Less than half a degree is hypo beginning, not to change and rigid regulation is the worst regulation, meaning there is no change.
If you think about your transmission in your car, but you want to shift gears from 1st to 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, depending on how fast your car is going. The body needs to do the same thing. It needs to shift gears depending on what’s going on. If I’m staying in a room cold, I want all my heat to go up to my brand and keep my brain warm one degree warmer than the rest of my body.
If it does that, great. If it doesn’t and it warms my left shoulder, for some reason, something’s off or this gets too hot. We’re looking at why the body’s doing that and what the patterns are. This has nine points on it that test your lymphatics. It wasn’t, “Some of the people who have lymphatic stagnancy, Dr. Jack.” It was not the case. It was 100% of the people I was doing this test on whether they came in with me, who was like, I felt great, had no symptoms, been drug-free for ten years, did this test. The person that read it to me said, I was like a 75-year-old person that had all these issues. I was like, “I’m so sick, but I feel great.”
It shows issues before blood would show right down to the stage four cancer person that showed up at our center that we did CRTs on. We could know which way to head regardless of the diagnosis and everybody in the middle. What we saw was 100% of the people had stagnant lymph. The first few years, I would tell people to dry brush, do rebounding and take these homeopathic and herbals. I would retest six months or a year later, scientifically, no sign of a change from the lymphatics.
Other things I had them do, castor oil packs, warming their liver, getting their amalgams out. The dental piece increased. The liver and kidneys improved, no change in the lymph. We start to try to detoxify and they feel horrible. I had to come up with ways to get that lymph to move in a different way. I started studying with this woman in New Zealand, Desiree De Spong, who I call the lymph goddess. She’s amazing. She has a ton of empirical-based data and has been researching lymph with cancer for years. She has developed a new machine that we now use to get people into a deep state of parasympathetic to get people to relax.
It always matters how you think and live your life.
Because what we’ve realized through all the lymph work is that if people relax, their lymph moves, so let’s get them to relax. Let’s get them engaged, parasympathetic and healing capacity of their body. We step back and watch the body do its job. We’ve had amazing results with it. That started this journey of the lymph because I realized I couldn’t help any other system in the body until the drainage is opened. Once I opened the drainage, all of a sudden, whatever symptom or diagnosis they were dealing with, the symptoms decreased, the regulation and their circadian rhythms increased. They started towards regeneration.
What I know, and I know you know as well, is we’re not stagnant beings. We’re ever-evolving, ever-changing dynamic organisms that are an ecosystem, that is either going towards health and regeneration or we’re degrading going towards degeneration. We’re not in the middle. Every day we make decisions to get up in the morning, drink our juices and do our yoga and our breathwork and get our bodies tuned in.
We eat carnivore diets throughout the day or whatever the case may be, to help improve our health knowledge that we have the capacity to turn that on. Those are decisions we make. If we all of a sudden say, “Screw it. I’m going to go eat at Dunkin Donuts for breakfast. I’m going to go to McDonald’s for lunch and Burger King for dinner.” In a short amount of time, that’s going to catch up with us depending on how long you’ve been living this way.
It’s not like, “I’ve arrived at health and now I’m healthy. It doesn’t matter what I do.” It always matters how we live our lives and how we think. It always matters what we drain out. That, to me, is the most important thing. Physical medicine is amazing, but we are 90% emotional beings having a physical experience and 90% of all illness is emotional. The lymph is absolutely about the physical body letting go, but it’s about the emotional body letting go. What are we willing to let go of? Our lymph will let go of it for us.
Kelly, we recognized how important the lymphatic system is now. What are some of those best strategies, therefore now going forward to help maybe on our own to be able to improve the lymphatic system? How do we find a good professional to work with like yourself?
The second question, I’m going to answer first. That is a challenge. I’ll be honest. There is a lot of lymph bodyworkers out there, but like anything else, some people took a class, have devoted their lives to it, and continued to do, expand and devote their skills. The first question I’d ask when you’re looking for a practitioner is how much lymph work do you do and what training do you have? If they say one school and I do it once a week, I will find another practitioner.
If you find a practitioner that goes, “That’s all I do, and I’ve studied at Matter, Checkley and Desiree De Spong, that’s somebody I would talk to. They have a touch. I teach a lymph node release class. I have a fair number of practitioners trained with myself and Desiree so we do have a select group of people that I like to refer to, but I’m sure you feel the same way, Dr. Jack. I love referring people out, but I’m very picky about who I refer out to because I want to know that they’re going to get the results that I’m accustomed to getting at our centers.
In regards to what we can do, if we don’t move, our lymph doesn’t move. The number one thing we have to do is move. Both of us are standing at a standing desk because we know it’s not good to sit. Moving your body is number one. If you’re sitting at a desk every hour, get up and move your arms up over your head. We’re pretty good at moving our legs at times like, “Let me move my hips.”
We forget to lift our arms above our heads. When you start to move, your skeletal muscles start to move and it starts to push the lymphatics. Unlike the cardiovascular system, the lymph doesn’t have its own pump. It only moves when our skeletal muscles move. That’s number one, move more. Number two, wear less tight-fitting clothes. The tighter your clothes are, the more they’re creating dams. As we mentioned, we have lymph from our head to our toes. If I have a wire bra on, I’m creating a dam and filling up the toxicants in my breast. No more wire bras, ladies. Be done with them.
Breast cancer, I’ve got no doubt, although I think I saw a study from a couple of years ago that seemed to refute that. It’s hard to find an objective control group that doesn’t wear bras. It seems like all women wear bras. Therefore, they’re all subject to increased breast cancer risk. Let me say this to hammer home on this point. Number one would be a lymphatic restriction, but also the metal wired bra. How does that EMF?
Ultimately, the way that most women wash their garments. If they wash their bra in Tide, fabric softener and dryer sheets. Now you’ve got this living, breathing organ, which is the breast and the endocrine tissue that absorbs in all those toxins. Now, you can’t get the toxins out because of the lack of lymphatic drainage systemically, but then also locally because of the constriction and voila, you’ve got breast cancer.
Use your aluminum deodorant after you shave and nick yourself in the shower. Put some chlorine in your armpits and then you put some aluminum deodorant, and that’s where the majority of women that get breast cancer get it right here. There’s a large lymph node right here. Seventy-five percent of our breast lymphatic drains here, and about 25% drains up to this area and then up to our termini. Breast health is so important because we might argue that the breasts are needed as a woman, as a man with four children, that the breasts are absolutely needed.
Biologically, breasts aren’t needed. They’re unnecessary. It’s a benign area for the body to store toxins. It’s fatty tissue and the body stores toxins in fats. It makes perfect sense. When you’ve been living this way for so long, I have not thought about the fabric softener and the detergent on the bras. Thank you for bringing that to my awareness. I don’t think I’ve thought about that in many years.
Tight-fitting clothes and women that wear tight-fitting pants, my husband laughs every time I say this because I often jump into my jeans, but my jeans came off the second I get in that house. I’ve got on loose-fitting flowy pants. I don’t wear them often at work either because I want looser pants for being able to be more flexible throughout my day. When I take my socks off, I’ve got lines on my ankles and my lymph is clogged and stagnant.
What do you think about the concept of wearing graduated compression stockings? Is that something that we could universally apply to a lot of people? I think that if people live their best life and do the things they need to do, the vast majority of people would not need graduated compression stockings. There are cardiovascular indications of which I use it and stuff like that. If someone’s a couch potato, they’re going to collect fluid in their legs. If someone’s up and moving around and their body parts and therefore, creating circulation and the lymphatics. In a circulation, you’re going to get rid of all the swelling and edema in those legs.
Band-Aids are what I look at compression socks and stockings. They’re great for a time period, but if you’re dependent upon them, you haven’t changed your lifestyle enough not to be dependent. It’s the same with supplements. I think supplements are great, but they’re supposed to be supplements, not for the rest of my life mints. I take supplements for a little bit of time until I’ve changed my lifestyle, diet, and nutrition enough to get everything out of it that I need outside of minerals because the soils are so depleted.
I think compression socks are also great when we know that we’re going to be sitting for a long time, regardless of our health, long car trips, flights. I don’t get swelling on flights and cars because I drained my lymph. I’m sure people sitting in the car next to me are like, “What the heck is she doing?” As I’m pumping my lymph, I know that I don’t get that restless leg that I used to get on long car trips and flights. I never got swelling, but that could have been because I was young. I wasn’t up to that point yet.
2020 has proven how sick the general population is, particularly in America. What is the statistic? Eighty-eight percent of our population has a metabolic disorder. That is ridiculous. Metabolic disorders are lifestyle problems. As we continue to correct how sick our population is, they will not be so dependent upon Band-Aids like compression socks and so forth, but if you need them in the meantime, great. I would also recommend throwing your legs up the wall every morning when you get out of bed after you do some quick movements. I don’t even call it exercise.
I certainly don’t call it yoga although some people could look at me and go, “I think that’s a yoga pose,” maybe, but I’m not a yoga instructor so I don’t call it yoga. I do movement every morning. I get my fascia moving, which we didn’t talk about. The fascia houses the lymph. The fascia is the skin under the skin. The fascia needs to be moved because otherwise, it starts to create adhesions. If I don’t move my shoulder for a week, it’s going to be harder after a week to move it out.
Wear less tight-fitting clothes to prevent the build-up of toxins in your body.
I broke my arm many years ago. When I first took the cast off, it was like, “It feels so good to move that,” but it takes them some time to get range of motion back. If I sit all day, go to bed, watch TV and never do this, the next time I do this, it’s going to be like crap because your fascia adhesions are breaking up. Your lymph can flow. We need to get better at dancing or moving in the morning and get our blood flowing, circulation of our lymphatics flowing so that edema has somewhere to go so we’re not dependent upon compression socks.
I think you were going to do some more demo and show us some of your techniques that we can do at home.
If you go to my NOTMEDS website, this is free. I have more explanation there on a video. If you sign up for my email newsletter list, you get a PDF of exactly what I’m going to teach you now. This is a simple technique that any human being can do and you can do this on children, pets. First of all, we all should have armpits. I have quite a few staff that have what’s called armed puffs. If it’s not concave, you’ve got lymph stagnancy.
This can also often happen at the back of your knees. A lot of women think that it’s fatness if we get these clumps. It’s probably lymphatic stagnancy more than anything. It doesn’t matter your size. You can be 350 pounds, you should still have an armpit. If not, you have lymph congestion. You can be 100 pounds soaking wet and have an armed puff, which means you have lymph stagnancy because you don’t have to have lymphedema to have a lymph problem.
Number one is self-check. Do I have an armpit or puff? Do I have a knee pit or puff? I always start at the end. Your termini, your lymphatic ends at a line of the ears. I take my ring and my middle finger from my ears down. In a circular motion, I’m gently pumping this area. I’m not going to push down. I’m going to roll it and pump it as I’m rolling. You can’t be at the wrong location. You start stimulating your lymph going after the lymph nodes below the skin level that needs a little stimulation.
I’m going to simulate that in a circular motion. I’m going to go under my jaw in front of my ears where the tonsils are. I’m going to roll down, pump about five pumps in each area. For those of you that have congestion, you’ll already start to feel the drainage. I’m going to go to what is known as our apical nodes, where women have bra straps. I’m going to pump both of those. I’m going to imagine that draining up now to my termini.
I opened up the exit doors and opened up my tonsils to get those to drain down, so my head drains. I’m going to get the rest of my body to drain up and start with my apical nodes. I’m going to do my armpit, which I’m going to do my left side first. There are reasons for all this, but I’m not going into all of that. We take our two fingers.
This one on the PDF is hard to understand, so I’m going to explain it. You put your fingers right in the center. You can feel it’s a little tender in there. That’s your lymph node. You’re going to close your armpit. What your job is to pump. It’s pushing that fluid. It looks like on the PDF that I’m pulling it out, but it’s hard to explain in a one-dimensional picture. I’m pumping up in the armpit toward my clavicle area from underneath.
The next area I’m going to do is the cisterna. In between your belly button and rib cage, somewhere in the middle, the easiest thing is to put your pinky in your belly button. Lay your hand there, take your two fingers and gently pump your cisterna chyli which is a larger sac. It’s not a node, but it’s a larger sac of the lymph that your spleen and liver drain into. Your inguinal, lower lymph all drain to the cisterna.
If you don’t do any other points, do your termini and your cisterna. If you have time, five minutes, do everything. You do termini, tonsils, apical node, armpits, cisterna and then inguinal. Your inguinal is on my leg side. I’m going to go to my leg, up to my hip and start to make circular motions toward my hip, all the way down to my inner thigh, coming back out and then you do the other leg. There are a few other spots that I teach on the PDF.
After you do your lymph node opening, you can then dry brush the same way. You always go towards the heart, but most people teach dry brushing starting at the feet and working up. It makes no sense to Kelly because you’ve got clogged doors. I got 50 cars lined up from my toes to here and here’s my toll booth. I’m going to open my toll booth to move the first car out. I’m not going to open my toll booth and ask the 50th car to come through the toll booth. It makes no sense. You want a dry brush in that same way. You don’t have to open up all your nodes, but you could.
At a minimum, open up these two nodes and then start dry brushing. You can use either the bumpy part or the brush part. You can use a dry old washcloth. It’s a little rough and gently brush your skin with it. It should be a nice gentle pink that your skin gets. It is not red. That’s too much. I go from closest to my body to then farther away. Basically, you’re creating a space of the traffic so that more traffic can then move up. You’re sweeping the whole body always going towards the heart because the heart is what it’s all about.
I’ve been guilty of that when I have done the dry brush, which is not often, but when I’ve done the dry brush over the years. Intuitively you would think, “I’m going to start in the bottom,” and start pushing everything up. It doesn’t work that way. If everything is all clogged up, there was nowhere to push it up into. Therefore, it stays all in one place. Start from the top, start at the core, if you will.
Kelly Kennedy, this has been absolutely fantastic. It’s a great 101 into the lymphatic system. No matter what people’s health issues or concerns are, this makes me think of all of our people, atrial fibrillation, high blood pressure, cholesterol and coronary disease. I know Kelly, you don’t like to make any medical claims but I like to. I like to say, the information we’re giving right here is going to help a lot of people with their specific cardiovascular conditions. Kelly, tell me again the best way for all of our people to find more information about you.
The Beats is my podcast. I’d love for everybody to subscribe to that. You can find that anywhere you listen to podcasts. It’s also found on the NOTMEDS Global website. NOTMEDSGlobal.com is where we host the podcast, but it’s also where we have information about lymphatics, free videos, great content and education. The True Wellness Center is our brick-and-mortar practice here in Pennsylvania as well as in South Carolina. Anywhere they can email me at either of those spots, but Kelly@NOTMEDSGlobal.com or Kelly@TheTrueWellnessCenter.com, either one works.
Kelly Kennedy, that was awesome. Another episode in the books. This is your home for your 100-year heart. That’s what we’re all about is making sure that you live your best and longest life. We appreciate all of you for your time, support and energy. We will see you back next time with another fantastic episode. Be well.
Important Links:
- The True Wellness Center
- NOTMEDSGlobal.com
- The Beats
- YouTube – NOTMEDS Global
- Instagram – NOTMEDS Global
- Nerve-Express Test
- Desiree De Spong
- Kelly@NOTMEDSGlobal.com
- Kelly@TheTrueWellnessCenter.com
About Kelly Kennedy
Like many who enter the world of biological & energetic healing, Kelly Kennedy had her own traumatic experiences that stimulated her in finding another approach to health. Her training started more traditionally at Cornell University with a desire to be an allopathic medical doctor. However, one particular year she was faced with her own health matters and the premature passing of her father. These experiences confirmed what Kelly intuitively knew within her bones; that good health was not restored through prescriptions.
After twenty-three years of building a health and wellness practice based in Bio-Regulatory medicine, Kelly is now paving the way for a new wellness system to blossom.
A Bio-Regulatory system, where therapists, doctors, and specialists work collaboratively within a paradigm that focuses on allowing the innate intelligence of each unique individual to truly heal the body.Kelly loves to talk about Regulation and Lymph and is often referred to as the “lymph queen”. Kelly is physically based outside of Philadelphia, PA with her husband Ian (her original practitioner in this world, blessed to be his wife now) and their son Silas. She continues to see and help clients with a bio-regulatory approach at The True Wellness Center in North Wales, PA and in Bluffton, SC. You can find Kelly virtually at notmedsglobal.com, NOTMEDSglobal YouTube channel & Instagram handle as well as on her podcast “The Beats with Kelly Kennedy”. Kelly has many projects in the works; make sure to subscribe to stay in touch as she continues to bring her heart to the world.
