Objective assessment of the Manual Lymph Drainage technique in chronic leg ulceration

Lymphostasis is a morbid condition frequently associated with limb ulceration. Manual Lymph Drainage (MLD) is a well-known massage technique for treatment of lymphedema. In this work, an objective method to assess the effectiveness of MLD is investigated. The dynamics of skin cooling after local heating at 43 °C has been compared before and after MLD, on the basis of a structural physiological model of the skin thermoregulation. Preliminary results, collected from a small sample of 7 patients, show a statistically significant increase (p = 0.007) of the ratio of the skin-subcutaneous tissue thermal conductance to the epidermis thermal capacitance, KST/CS, after MLD. This finding encourages further experimentation on a wider group size