It seems like having tight socks around your legs would prevent blood circulation, but the description for compression socks say they help increase circulation. How?
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It pushes blood up to the rest of your body. It restricts blood flow a little to the lower extremities, but mainly helps push blood up.
Compression stockings are commonly used for things like chronic venous insufficiency. Normally, your veins have little one way valves in them to make sure blood can only flow towards the heart (unlike arteries, veins have lower pressure and the heart isn’t directly pumping blood through them, so things like muscle contraction in your calves helps push the blood along). Chronic venous insufficiency means that these valves aren’t doing their job properly, so now blood is flowing back down to your feet and pooling up. Compression stockings create a pressure gradient to push the blood in the direction of the heart once again. Also, since arterial pressure is normally higher than venous pressure, arterial flow is not affected as much.
You not totally wrong OP. Compression socks are useful treating venous insufficiency, just like another user said but sometimes but in some conditions it actually worsens affects circulation negatively. For example, in patients with peripheral arterial disease, blood leaves the heart (that is arterial blood) but it doesn’t reach some areas, mainly our lower extremities. That way, cells don’t get oxygen and nutrients and then die out. Using compression socks with this condition is bad because the arteries that supply the blood are already tight (as in compressed) and that’s why there is a poor blood flow to our legs and feet. That being said, compression socks would compress even further and leave even more damage to the blood vessels.
TL;DR: in venous insufficiency compression socks help blood return to the heart and in arterial insufficiency it prevents blood from reaching the cells.
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