Venous return

So like a compression boot, which you can put on your legs, uh, at night, let's say like at the end of the day, you can put your feet up, you're sitting on the couch, you put on the compression boot, which is inflates on your leg and helps push fluid back from.

your feet from your calves from your thighs up into the abdomen to help with venous return i like that for two reasons one is that they feel good i mean patients find that it's comfortable you know it's like oh at the end of the day i'm getting all this fluid out of my legs great

have you used them alexis have you i have yeah i bought some of the cheap ones on

amazon and i used them for a little while and then they broke and i was like yeah okay but yeah they feel good right It's so good.

This is the skeletal muscle venous pump.

It is responsible for about 30% of cardiac venous return.

So what happens when you sit for eight hours like a bumpkin? The pump stops.

venous return drops blood pools in your lower extremities hydrostatic pressure in the capillary beds of the legs increases fluid is forced out of the capillaries into the interstitial space i talked about this at the beginning you get edema so your ankles balloon up big clown feet the exact symptom every sedentary patient with heart failure presents with

But it's not heart failure.

It's not.

So that's why the second one is important.

The third is having unobstructed venous return, meaning that there is open pathway for blood to actually find its way back to the heart and really to the single ventricle that's there to do the pumping.

So if it's the dominant right ventricle, there needs to be an unobstructed way for blood to come back to the corresponding atrium, but primarily to fill the right ventricle.

Or the other way around, if it's a dominant left ventricle that you're filling the left side.

So in the previous episode, we talked about ways that we can place a shunt or the natural different types of shunts that people have.

But how are we controlling the amount of flow that's going to your lungs to make sure that we're balancing the QPQS, which we'll get into a little bit more.

The third bucket she's referring to is, is blood flow going across your atriums and is it getting to the ventricles? So that is venous return unobstructed.

And I love that you highlighted the two modifying ones.