♪ Bob and Brad, the two most famous ♪
♪ Physical therapists on the internet ♪
- Hi, folks.
I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- We are the most famous physical therapists
on the internet.
- In our opinion, of course, Bob.
- A little demented and sad to think that.
Today, we're talking about the Cornish Method
to reduce swelling in your legs.
- Like a Cornish hen?
- No, this is Dr. Cornish.
- Ah.
- We're gonna talk about this in just a second.
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- So Brad, I was contacted by Kurdish Cornish, PhD.
He's a, he was a cardiovascular physiologist.
- Sure.
- At, and professor, at the University of Nebraska.
- You can't go wrong in Nebraska.
They got a lot of corn there.
- Yeah, Omaha.
So for 37 years, anyway.
- It's kind of interesting.
There's a lot of corn there and his name is Cornish.
Take the, I-S-H off, that's probably how he got there.
- Very good.
- We better get on.
He'll get mad at me.
- All right.
So he had an anterior hip replacement.
- Yep.
- He had trouble with swelling
in his upper thigh to his knee.
Very common.
He tried ice and it did nothing.
- Right, right.
- And I agree with this a hundred percent.
- Yeah, for edema, I don't think it's gonna hurt anything,
but it ...
- Well, I think it'll stop it from getting worse.
It constricts your arteries and veins and lymphatics.
So it stops from getting worse,
but it does nothing to remove the fluid.
- Sure.
- So, you know, and he being a smart guy,
knowing what he's doing,
he had an inversion table, I believe.
- Well, that's what this is.
- Yeah, and he set it up for 15 degrees.
Let me warn you right away, though.
I don't want you doing any of these methods
unless you check with your doctor first,
because there's some people
who should not be doing the inversion
and we don't want you to do blame us.
- (laughs) Well, we don't want you to get hurt.
You know, have some health problem.
And we're only going 15 degrees.
It's not very much, but still,
if you've got some cardiac problems or some other issues.
- You could flood your system.
- Yeah, it could be a problem.
- But he, you know, he only went 15 degrees,
which was not pressure on his hip, either.
So he was able to tolerate that very well.
Brad, why don't you get into the device right now?
And we have a Teeter table here.
Is that what it's called?
Teeter envision, inversion table?
- Yeah. T-E-E-T-E-R.
And actually, that's the name of the guy who, who invented,
he didn't invert inversion tables, but he produces these.
- I find that amazing that a guy named Teeter
invented like a teeter-totter.
- Yeah, and that's kind of like, what this is.
So, it was meant to be.
- So Brad has locked his legs in place.
- Yep.
- And now what do you do, Brad?
- Okay, once you set this up,
we're not going to go through how to set it up.
I've already adjusted, there's adjustments here
and adjustments here, and once you get it set up,
you should be able to go back very controllably.
And just by changing my hands like this to here,
I can change whether or not
I want to go up to this position.
- Yeah, and he's got a strap underneath the device here.
It's set at 15 degrees.
So you can see 15 degrees is not very far.
So Dr. Cornish, what he did,
when you first did this,
he did some muscle contraction, too,
but he got bored with that, so he stopped.
(Brad laughing)
He lied there for 30 minutes and after 30 minutes,
the edema had gone down one inch.
- Just from gravity?
- Right, just from gravity.
So, you know, you can get a table
for not that much of an amount.
You know, if you're having trouble with your back
and you want to try this for that, too.
I'm definitely going to be an advocate of this.
I don't know if I'd get this
just for edema after a surgery.
- No, because you could raise the foot of your bed up
and, you know, get that 15 degrees, which isn't a lot,
but you're not going to sleep like that all night long.
- Right.
So you have options, you know,
can you put your legs up on pillows?
Well, the problem with that is the lymphedema,
the edema has to travel from the leg,
go all the way up to the chest,
where it, it actually goes into the venous system.
It goes into thoracic venous system.
So if it gets caught, if your legs are bent.
- Yeah, if your hips are flexed,
if you just put the pillows underneath your legs,
your hips will flex.
And that. - Right, and the edema
- That creates a dam, so to speak,
right in your lymph node area in the femoral crease.
- So it can stop the edema from traveling all the way up.
So yeah, you could raise the foot of your bed up,
you know, put some blocks underneath.
Or you were talking about sine and cosine,
I don't know what you're talking about,
but as far as like, formula for how far you'd put it.
- I'm sure you could Google it.
But I would say if you raise the end, we should've,
I should've figured this out before the video.
Probably six inches would be enough.
- And, and again, though, I wouldn't go past 30 minutes,
so it'd be a little bit of a hassle.
- Yeah, you got to set your timer alarm,
because if you fall asleep and are there for a couple hours,
that's not desirable.
We want to stick to the 30 minutes, so.
- Now, if you have complications from chronic edema,
this may be something you want to consider,
because these, I'm going to read
some of the complications, Brad.
- Okay.
- So there's painful swelling, difficulty walking,
stiffness, stretched skin,
which can become itchy and uncomfortable.
I've seen the skin break down, haven't you?
- Yeah or actually reef
- Yeah, that actually like your clothes become all wet.
- Yeah, you really got to have a doctor
along with you on that.
- Scar in between the layers of tissues,
decreased blood circulation.
He was talking about compartment syndrome.
- Oh yeah.
- That could happen, especially
in the lower compartments here.
Decreased elasticity of the arteries, veins, joints,
and muscles, and increased risk of skin ulcers.
That's where you're talking about.
- Sure. - Skin ulcers.
So, you know, I, again,
I don't know if I'd get a table just for after surgery.
- Right.
- For an issue like that.
But if you have chronic edema,
this might be the, the answer to you.
And plus, you're going to stretch out your back
a little bit, too.
- Yeah, I can feel it now.
We do have some videos on how to use
an inversion table for back pain,
because typically you'll go more than 15 degrees
for your back.
- Yeah, some people go all the way, in fact,
which I wouldn't recommend.
- I don't recommend that either, but I know they do it.
- Brad did this.
He used a table for years, right?
- I had it for about a year and a half, two years
and it helped initially.
And then I wasn't getting relief.
You know, I got spondylolisthesis.
Whatever, you're only going to do this if it feels good.
If you have problems, if you have eye problems,
you have to be careful because
that increases pressure in your eyes.
And that's something you need to talk to your doctor about.
Most people are, if you're a healthy person in general,
you don't have a heart problem,
you don't have any eye problems,
you're probably going to be fine doing it,
but don't invert all the way right away, for sure.
You really gotta work into it slowly.
- So this is an example, again, Brad,
where I think it's really cool, where our audience
jumped in and participated
and gave us some helpful information
that we never would have found out on our own.
- Yeah.
So this is one of those things that,
obviously done by PhDs, very familiar.
- He taught lymphedema.
- Right, yeah.
That was his subject.
So, but this is not out there, I think.
- No.
- It's not like, you know, it probably will be.
- The Cornish Method
- Yep, exactly.
- We started it right here.
- Thank you, Dr. Cornish. - Thanks for watching.
Yep, thank you, Dr. Cornish.