Does massage 'flush out your toxins'?

In short, yes, but not how you might think.

Massage doesn't directly flush toxins out of your body. You won't be seeing toxins oozing from your pores, ew!

What happens, as I understand it, is that it helps to mobilize the lymphatic system. This is a network of channels like your veins and arteries, but which carry lymph cells. These are like Roombas for your body. They go around picking up expired blood cells, cleaning them up, removing pollutants like viruses, and returning them to the blood stream for another go.

The lymph system, unlike your blood or vascular system, is not under pressure. You don't have another heart to pump the lymph through your body. Instead, it relies on the movement of your body.

So, the less movement you make, the more sluggish this cleaning system is. You can imagine how ineffective it might get if you are in bed all day and every day.

So, massage, in mobilising the fascia and organs not just squishing your muscles, assists in moving lymph towards the nodes that form the main channels of flow. A good massage therapist will ensure that the direction of their strokes is towards these nodes. This movement may kick off a reaction of the immune system to squish those unwanted molecules.This is why you might get a snotty nose, or even flu symptoms, after a massage.

So, massage itself can't get the toxins' out, but it does assist your body to do it's own cleaning and tidying.