Cupping therapy increases circulation and promotes healing

Cupping is a form of healing therapy that gained exposure during the 2016 Olympics, when a lot of U.S. athletes showed up to the games with circular red and purple marks all over their bodies, particularly on the large muscles of the arms, shoulders and back. Read on to learn how cupping is used in a clinical setting, about evidence of its benefits for a few different conditions, and also why it's important to have a trained professional administering the treatment.

Cupping is relatively new in America, but it's been used all over the world for thousands of years. An Egyptian medical text from 1550 BC describes cupping, and the Greek historian Herodotus describes it in 400 BC. It's been used in China for at least 3,000 years. All the practitioners here at Evergreen Medical Acupuncture were trained using glass cups in the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) style, but cupping has been recorded by historians and archaeologists as a folk remedy in places like Iran, Europe, and other countries around the world.

But folk remedy doesn't mean junk remedy: there are more than 6,000 studies on PubMed, and there's a lot of potential shown that cupping has real benefits, especially for injuries and chronic pain. There's also reason to believe it may help with acne and some other skin conditions, facial paralysis, and some pulmonary conditions, theoretically by increasing circulation to the lungs and helping clear phlegm from the posterior lung walls. It's been used in many cultures for treating cold and flu symptoms.

In the realm of Chinese medicine, physical injuries are generally described as "Qi and Blood" stasis, meaning circulation is impaired from blood clots or scar tissue. In an acute injury, the tissue is swollen—an excess of blood and lymph is gathering in the area, creating pain. All of the cellular activity involved in addressing the wound is what we'd refer to as Qi. When Qi is excessively gathered in one area, or when functioning is impaired or altered, that's "stagnant Qi."

When a muscle is chronically tight, cellular waste like lactic acid gets trapped in the muscle layer. Creating suction with the cups helps draw it out to help your body dispose of it. Cupping increases local blood circulation, which can help with tissue repair. In Chinese medicine terms, we would say that moving "Qi and Blood" helps stop pain and aids the body in reestablishing homeostasis, which is what we call a balance of yin and yang, or "Qi and Blood."

To administer fire cupping, you put a cotton ball on some forceps and soak it in alcohol. Light it on fire, put it in the cup, withdraw it and very quickly place the cup on the patient's skin, creating warmth and suction. We often put down oil and carefully slide the cup between the shoulder blades, tracing the posterior neck muscles, across the lower back, or along the long muscles that are particularly tight.

When you do it right, it feels like you've had a deep massage even with 10 minutes of cupping. The physiological principle is similar to a deep tissue massage, but inverse: instead of pressure, you're using suction to release muscle spasms and increase circulation to the body surface. This is great for busy doctors and patients, for athletes who repeatedly overuse certain muscles, or for that stubborn knot that doesn't seem to go away.

One of those photos from the 2016 Olympics showed an athlete with cupping marks on the chest, seemingly self-administered with a plastic set that uses a suction pump. Acupuncturists are generally trained to avoid the heart, as well as large blood vessels and nerves, because we haven't studied whether it's really safe. When cupping the neck, you need to take care to avoid the carotid artery—it seems best to stick to large muscles and avoid the structures in a system that depend on a fine balance of pressure.

We prefer glass cups to plastic because the amount of suction you can apply is kind of self-limiting. When you use plastic cups with a pump, it's easy to go overboard if you haven't had much training in what it's supposed to feel and look like. Going overboard looks like blisters, broken skin or burns. Sometimes we will use silicone cups to treat hard-to-reach or sensitive places like the occiput or calves.

When patients have told me that they've had painful experiences with cupping, it's usually been with plastic cups and a practitioner who was poorly trained. There's no real risk when you see a well-trained professional. You should expect bruising after cupping, but the marks don't feel like bruises at all; it's just old blood and cellular waste coming to the surface as the muscle layer is cleared. People generally feel amazing after, and you will too!