161 - Dr. Raymond Perrin on Pathways to Recovery - part 2

Long COVID presents a multi-faceted challenge that requires a comprehensive approach for effective treatment. Dr Raymond Perrin explores how lymphatic drainage through his unique technique can help alleviate symptoms and support long-term recovery.

This is part 2 of this conversation - hear part 1 HERE

• Understanding the significance of the lymphatic system in health 
• Diagnostic methods for identifying Long COVID symptoms 
• The role of heavy metals and toxicity in illness 
• Introduction to the Perrin Technique for lymphatic drainage 
• The concertina effect explained for effective treatment 
• Self-massage and breathing exercises as healing methods 
• Research findings supporting patient engagement in recovery 
• Managing muscle fatigue through proper lymphatic flow 
• The jigsaw puzzle analogy illustrating holistic recovery 
• Strategies for preventing fibrosis in affected patients

For  more information about The Perrin Technique visit  www.theperrintechnique.com

Self massage techniques available here

Chapters

• 0:00 Diagnosing and Treating Long Covid
• 15:59 Restoring Health Through the Looking Glass

Transcript

Jackie Baxter: 0:55

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Long Covid Podcast. I am delighted to welcome back Dr Raymond Perrin and we started this conversation last week and we dived deep into the science of lymphatic drainage and an amazing description of what the Perrin technique basically does. We're now gonna dive a little bit more into how this actually works, what this is going to look like for you, for example. So welcome back, dr Perrin, and here we go. How do you diagnose that this is a problem? I mean, I suppose someone presenting with long COVID, you can kind say, right, well, I think I know what's happening here, but so what's your sort of diagnostics?

Dr Raymond Perrin: 1:44

I suppose we did this for ME. We did a research within the NHS which was published in the British Medical Journal, so we were very proud of that in 2017 and that was on the ME CFS. And people are saying but long COVID is different and it's not much different. The difference is is the trigger, but there are one or two differences we see with long COVID and we'll get to that. But basically, the diagnostics are going through the symptoms, the history, finding out problems in the past, because every ME patient, every long COVID patient, has something prodromally we call it prodromal Before the illness starts.

Dr Raymond Perrin: 2:25

There's things happening Before the virus and you go right back in history. You'll find problems at birth, problems during the teenage years. Possibly it could be emotional stress that causes a lot of neuroinflammation. It could be physical stress from injuries. It could be environmental stress, pollution, heavy metals and neurotoxins a lot of heavy metals and I made a new discovery just three months ago that's in my book that there's and this is a bit for the conspiracy theorists, but not but with uh if you take a neodymium magnet, which is a very strong magnet, right here and you stick it onto uh patients spines with me long covered it it shouldn't stick to your body shouldn't stick anywhere in the body. Um, what we found is it sticks a lot on people and their arms where they've had injections in the past, because they used to contain metals aluminium and most vaccines have contained aluminium oxide. Now those metals are not magnetic. But what we're seeing is in most people, even non-COVID people, if you put the magnets on there it sticks. I've shown this and demonstrated this at conferences and it shouldn't. But the reason why it does is because if you go back to the famous Faraday experiment in physics, they put a long iron rod and you put a copper tube around it which is non-magnetic. You send an electric charge through through. It becomes a magnetic field.

Dr Raymond Perrin: 4:01

Now, in my new shy, in my new terms, we have tiniest lymph vessels spiraling around blood. Blood contains hemoglobin hemoglobin in in me patients and long cover patients. We're seeing sticky blood. We're seeing lots of clumps of red blood cells altogether and this clumping of the blood produces a small, very, very minute iron core element. It's not proper iron and it shouldn't be magnetic. However, if you spiral around that lymphatic vessels which are full of mercury and aluminium and other toxins, lead from lead petrol years ago and it spirals around, if you then attach electric charge provided by the nervous system and with me there's more nervous system it creates an electric magnetic field and that is my theory it's got.

Dr Raymond Perrin: 5:03

We're going to do a lot of research into this. This is just new. But what we're seeing, the first thing is observe in science and we're observing this, what we're finding. One sticks in the forehead, where the above, where the plate would be in the brain, and then, uh, in the skull, and then another in the spine and you can see the spine's very flattened in this patient and we see a lot of mid-thoracic flattening affecting the drainage, and we're seeing this again and again and again in all our patients. So in healthy people it just drops off, but if you've got a problem so I'm not saying there's microchips and nanobots put in by Bill Gates into people, but it's going back to physics and I think that's something in physics is creating this magnetic field in the surface of the skin and if the drainage is going backwards, instead of draining out of the brain and out of the skull, it's going the wrong way. It's going to build up in the tissues around it, including the superficial fascia underneath the skin. So this is something new which we're doing on all our patients and we're starting to teach this around the world.

Dr Raymond Perrin: 6:15

To look at this, because I think that heavy metals are part of the picture. It's a small part, but this builds up to the and they're attracted. The reason why they're neurotoxic is they're attracted to the fat of the brain and the fat of the nervous system. They're what we call lipophilic. So these metals are toxic and there's lots of environmental pollution. There's about 100,000 chemicals in the environment that are poisonous to us. Plus you've got the viruses and bacteria and fungi 100,000 chemicals in the environment that are poisonous to us. Plus you've got the viruses and bacteria and fungi and mould all building up and then eventually one final trigger, and this is in the COVID case. It's the COVID that stimulates the last bit of the picture, where it just overloads the sympathetics and everything goes pear-shaped and everything starts going backflow and it gets more and more and eventually the person gets what we call long COVID and that's what caused it.

Dr Raymond Perrin: 7:11

So the physical signs are there.

Dr Raymond Perrin: 7:13

The spine we can feel heat in the spine from inflammation.

Dr Raymond Perrin: 7:18

We can see redness around there. From the sympathetic nerves firing off. We can see spots coming out from other toxins, from bacterial infection causing acne. Sometimes we can feel the breast tissue when it drains backwards. You'll find lumps and bumps in the breast tissue that are not cancerous or anything. They're just these varicose lymph. You can feel them, you can see them in some patients and I said in the book we've got one patient that was so, so visual. Uh, she agreed to have a chest, uh taken a photo of to see the lump. They they're colourless, they're like Varicose veins but they're colourless and it's because the backflow of lymph has been building up for years and years and years and this is a sign of it. And there's also tender points which I discovered, that are due to lymph and nerve pain and the cranial flow is not working properly and we can feel that by feeling the rhythm and that's we're trained to do that.

Dr Raymond Perrin: 8:14

And those are the physical signs of long COVID, as well as the physical signs of ME and fibromyalgia and a few other neurolymphatic disorders. So those are the signs and once we've got that, plus the history and the symptoms, when we have a very good. In our study we did in the NHS, we showed around 85% of diagnostics using the signs, so compared to 44% by a doctor using neurological and rheumatological signs to see the same patients, and this is when they weren't allowed to speak and tell them anything about the history or symptoms, just the physical signs. So that was published in the British Medical Journal in 2017 and we found the same signs in long Covid as well. So it's the physical signs plus the history plus the symptoms we develop.

Jackie Baxter: 9:10

We get a diagnosis okay, that's really interesting, you know, I mean, history is important, but that you could actually just look at somebody and be like, okay, even just from kind of looking at that little bit of their body, I've got a pretty good idea of what might be going on here. That's pretty cool. Um, so I guess can you just talk a little bit about what does the technique sort of involve?

Dr Raymond Perrin: 9:33

so I had to develop a technique that drained the toxins in the right way. So I developed what we call the concertina effect In the different parts of the world they call it accordion or harmonica effect pushing the lymph down the head by doing gentle massage techniques on the face and the head, neck, and then up the chest, and you create a concertina in the drainage where it actually should drain into the blood. So you create this pressure and this pressure then pushes into the blood. And then we do it from the back as well, stimulating the cranial rhythm by using cranial techniques to pump this fluid out into the lymph and then down into the subclavian area, into the what we call the venous angles that I talked about earlier. And this pushes it and this creates the second physical effect, the siphon effect. Siphon, you know, you create a pressure differential and you suck up water it will go into. Uh, if you're cleaning the fish tank or you're getting petrol illegally from a car, I shouldn't say that. So if you drain off the fluids that way, it continues that pressure differential because of gravity and because you've created the sucking effect. And this is the same thing. We push the down and up, creating this drainage, and this drainage then pushes all the fluid into the blood and if you keep on doing it it will continue this pressure gradient difference and that's what creates this siphon effect and then it just drains away and bit by bit it will drain away from the rest of the body and it takes time and bit by it will drain away from the rest of the body and it takes time and bit by bit it'll drain away from the brain, from the spinal cord.

Dr Raymond Perrin: 11:18

We use work to work on the spine. We do cranial work on the head, we do gentle massage techniques on the spine and we get things moving better. And we give patients self-massage routines to do as well and self-exercise, and those are freely available on our website for everybody and there's no subscription charges. I don't believe in that. I want my work out there, I want people to be helped. So there's, you can go online and we did just did completed an nhs research study last year. Um, that we did um and it was nhs, um sponsored. They didn't fund it but they oversaw it. It was a manchester uh, the northern health alliance, the trust, and this is a group of hospitals that that were involved and we basically gave patients their exercise routines and their the massage routines that they could do it themselves. Because some patients can't get to practitioners and unfortunately the practitioners who we train are all private. We're trying to get an NHS but the NHS are obviously interested in effectiveness but also cost effectiveness.

Dr Raymond Perrin: 12:30

So the self-massage routine we did a feasibility study on 100 people and we showed that it was feasible to do the study and people kept with it. The 79 percent of the people who started the self-massage routine finished it. So it was quite a high rate of patients keeping to this. So obviously, obviously it felt to help them and we showed some of the patients just doing the self-massage felt a lot better. Most of them felt some improvement.

Dr Raymond Perrin: 13:02

But that's just part of the treatment. The treatment is with a practitioner and we knew we weren't sure that it would help at all with his self-massage, but it showed some patients that's what they needed. So we do that, the self-massage, self-exercise as well. To keep everything moving in the right direction. We give them breathing exercises, if you're happy to know, and those exercises are to open up the rib cage, to open up the diaphragm, which will help the main duct of the lymph move better and will help the ribs and the lungs move better as well and this helps the whole lymph, not just in the brain and spine but the whole body.

Dr Raymond Perrin: 13:41

The treatment and it's important to get the whole body's drainage working. Because if the lymph isn't working, the muscles and a lot of patients that isn't you get muscle fatigue very easily, muscle aches and that's lactic acid buildup, because extra lactic acid which has been shown to happen in ME is drained away by the lymphatics. The lymphatics are working the wrong way. It builds up the toxins that actic acid builds up in the muscles. Likewise, in inflammation, infection, you have fibroblasts that are there to heal the tissue and those fibroblasts need to be drained away.

Dr Raymond Perrin: 14:20

And if they're drained the wrong way, because there's this backflow, you'll end up with fibroblastic activity building up in the hearts, in the lungs, in the kidneys, and what do we see? Fibrotic tissue formation. There's fibrosis in lungs, fibrosis in heart, fibrosis in kidneys in long COVID patients. So this prevents that happening as well. So if you do the drainage, it drains away the fibroblasts as well from the rest of the body and reduces that chance of having this fibrotic tissue in the different tissues as well. So that's the treatment. It's basically lymph drainage, cranial treatment and simple exercise to keep the spine moving, not graded exercise programme, nothing like that. But we do gentle exercise to keep the spine moving, get things moving and get them sitting up better, more, which helps patients, very severe patients, because that will help the drainage as well. So that's the parent technique that's amazing.

Jackie Baxter: 15:19

I feel like I've learned so much from hearing all of this and I feel like I need to go and listen again to actually properly take it all in. I think, um, but I think that's awesome because you know there will be people that can access a practitioner, and that's awesome, and I'll make sure that that gets linked in the show notes. Um, for people who can do that, but for those who maybe can't for whatever reason, be it location or money or ability to leave the house, you know, whatever that reason is that actually there are things that they could start doing yeah, and the book, my book, uh, through the looking glass, and I said it's called through the looking glass because our paper I predicted what's going to happen has actually happened.

Dr Raymond Perrin: 16:00

So we called the book through the looking glass. It's, if you've ever read the alice in wonderland, storiesland, through the looking glass. When she went through the looking glass, everything was upside down and back to front. So this is what's happening with the limp. It's going the wrong way and we need to get it restored in the right way. So there's an extra reason why it's through the looking glass as well.

Jackie Baxter: 16:20

I love that. That's brilliant. So, yeah, and I'll also make sure that that gets linked in the show notes as well. So if anyone's interested in checking that out, I'm sure it's going to be amazing.

Dr Raymond Perrin: 16:30

The main thing to take away that they can do is what I call the jigsaw puzzle analogy and that's rest, relaxation, meditation and pace. Those are the core of the jigsaw puzzle. The parent technique in the neurolym system is important to get, to stimulate the, the healing, and to prevent it from happening again, because this is a problem. A lot of people are getting better and then going downhill again. So this this actually helps when you get the drainage system working to stop it happening again.

Dr Raymond Perrin: 17:02

And then you do all the extra things in the middle the, the talk, that is the, the supplements and everything else is the other sea and sky. And some patients have small jigsaw puzzles where you just get the corners right, edge pieces and a few pieces, and some people are a thousand piece jigsaw puzzles and I have one patient who is, uh, is a baked beans jigsaw puzzle. She says, and sometimes you don't know where to start, but if you start with the corners, rest, relaxation, meditation and pacing and work on the drainage system, then we help most people and that's the jigsaw because that's how you can then start to actually see what else is going on in the body, can't you?

Jackie Baxter: 17:44

because there's just it's kind of like just kaboom everywhere and you can't see the wood for the trees, which is what the breathing helped me so much with. Thank you so much for coming along and giving up your time and educating me and everybody else. It's been really fascinating.