Aaron Hartman, MDFunctional Medicine Specialist | Clinical Researcher

What you need to know: Posture and POTS

26 May 2023 · 1 min

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0:39

Short video/transcript excerpt (YouTube) by Aaron Hartman, MD explaining how body posture affects blood pooling, kidney fluid handling, and symptoms of POTS; suggests interventions such as sleeping on an incline and use of compression stockings to reduce morning orthostatic variation.

Chapters

When you lay down, one of the things that happens is blood will kind of pool in your body and your brain. You're actually. What happens actually is your kidneys feel, hey, there's not enough fluid in my body. And your kidney starts holding on to fluid more, and then you stand up. You can have irregularity in that sometimes. Actually, you can actually help treat this by actually sleeping on an incline. And so what happens is you get a little bit of that fluid pressure off of your kidneys, and you don't have such a big variation first thing when you get up in the morning, or by having sleeping with compression sock stockings at night, or by putting them on first thing in the morning. So it's really interesting how much your posture can change the pressures related to pots.