Venous and lymphatic drainage

Why this matters

Everything you will ever do to a tooth happens upstream of two drainage systems that end in the same place. Blood from the face and mouth leaves through the facial, retromandibular and pterygoid channels into the jugular veins; tissue fluid leaves through lymphatics into a few dozen nodes per side of the neck and then into the same jugular veins at the root of the neck.

The big picture

Two outflows, one exit. VENOUS: the face drains forwards and downwards into the facial vein, backwards and deep into the pterygoid venous plexus, and behind the ramus into the retromandibular vein, which splits so that one division joins the facial vein towards the internal jugular and the other becomes the external jugular.

The 14 cards in this lesson

1. 01Two outflows, one exit - and the names that have changed
2. 02The facial vein: a reliable trunk with an unreliable tributary field
3. 03The retromandibular vein: two divisions, two destinations, one unreliable landmark
4. 04Where the blood actually goes - textbook sentence versus measured departure
5. 05The pterygoid plexus and the doors in the skull base
6. 06The cavernous sinus is a plexus in fat, not a cavern
7. 07The danger area: the risk is real, the reason you were given is wrong
8. 08Clinical alert — in the lesson
9. 09The jugular veins: the exit, and how variable it is
10. 10From mucosa to node to jugular trunk - and what the pulp does not have
11. 11Reading the neck as levels I to VI
12. 12Every part of the mouth, and where its lymph goes first
13. 13The neck lump: what your hands settle, what they cannot, and who takes the sample
14. 14What is measured, what is inferred, and where the published numbers break

You have got it when

You can trace one drop of blood from the medial canthus to the right atrium and name every named channel it passes through - angular, facial, common facial, internal jugular, brachiocephalic, superior vena cava - and say which step on that route is the least constant.