After the Gold medal Olympians showing off their purple marks in the field of 2016 Rio Olympics, like Michaele Phelps, this ancient therapy called cupping is unveiled to public and caught lots of attention from NY Times, USA Today, CNN, and even Wall Street Journal. But it is a common therapy we provide to our patients every day in our acupuncture and Chinese medicine clinic.
Although cupping is not for everyone, we will talk about it later after a brief summary of who will benefit from it. The most common problems we treat with cupping in the clinic are pains. According to “Acupuncture – A Comprehensive Text”, we use single cups to apply on smaller areas or specific points of tenderness, e.g. certain stomach diseases or supraspinatus tendinitis, or we use multiple cups for disorders over a wider area, e.g. along a strained muscle, or arranged horizontally or vertically in rows on the skin above a diseased internal organ, it is quite like the pictures of athletes from Rio Olympics treating their injured and sore muscles.
Combined with herbal medicine preparation, acupuncture, and blood-letting (wet cupping), we use cupping to treat a wider range of diseases including pains but not limited to arthritic pain, abdominal pain, stomach-ache, indigestion, headache, hypertension, common colds, cough, low back pain, painful menstruation, soft tissue injuries, pruritus, neurasthenia and etc.
Because the common way of cupping is done to treat disorders caused by blockage or stagnation, it is not good for people who are weak, like seniors with weak constitution and chronic diseased patients, because cupping can cause exhaustion for them. Frequent cupping can cause dependence on it, weaken one's constitution in the long run and reduce the body's self-healing ability
Please come to us for questions of cupping and what we can do to help you. We can integrate other techniques from Traditional Chinese Medicine to help your conditions. Check out our blogs.
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