Your vascular tree

Your circulatory system consists of arteries, capillaries, veins and lymphatics, which all work together to nourish and detoxify the body. Here we will concentrate on your peripheral vascular tree, as opposed to your heart, although the same principles of treatment apply to the entire system, also known as your circulatory system.

Blood moves through the circulatory system by being pumped out by the left side of heart. Blood leaves the heart filled with oxygen and starts its journey through the arteries. The arteries keep branching off into smaller and smaller tubes, like the branches of a tree, which progressively become thinner and thinner as you move away from the central trunk. These bring oxygen and other nutrients to the cells of the body’s tissues and organs. The smallest tubes are called capillaries. As blood moves through the capillaries, the oxygen, hormones and critical nutrients make their way into all your trillions of cells.

After all their amazing metabolic processes, waste matter from the cells goes into the capillaries and makes its way into the veins in an almost reverse order, where the branches become progressively larger and larger until they find themselves back into the right side of the heart. Veins are thin-walled structures inside of which a set of valves keeps blood in the body flowing in one direction and against gravity back towards the heart. Arteries have no valves.

From the right side of the heart