Cupping Therapy

What is Cupping Therapy?

Cupping is a very popular and age-old therapy that has been around for thousands of years. From ancient times, it has been a very popular form of alternative medicine for a very long time.

It involves the use of special cups, the therapist will put on your skin for a few minutes to create suction.

People seek cupping therapy for many purposes, including to help with decreasing pain and inflammation, increasing blood flow, promoting relaxation and improving well-being, and it has also been used as a type of deep-tissue massage.

The most popular type of cups used for cupping are glass cups. These are made specifically for this therapy and are in different sizes, and are shaped very round with a flat opening at the bottom. Other cups may be made of plastic, silicone, earthenware and bamboo.

Ancient therapy effective at detoxing the muscles and your soft tissues through improving cellular health.

What to expect

Once the therapist has assessed the areas that need to be worked on the procedure goes as follows;

Find the area that needs to be treated
Sanitise the area using alcohol swab
Lightly apply a water based massage oil on the area
When using a flammable cupping set, light a cotton bud on fire
Cupping needs a vacuum effect to be created so it can suck up a small amount of the affected area inside the cup
The suction effect can also be done via a pump with a plastic cupping set, a vacuum effect either with the pump or the flame sucks out the oxygen thus creating the vacuum effect of the muscle inside the cup
Depending on which form of treatment your therapists performs, they can perform either static or dynamic cupping.
Static cupping is where a greater suction takes place and the cups do not move from the affected area for at least 10 minutes
Dynamic cupping is where a lighter suction takes place and the cup is moved in different positions in order to massage the affected area, this is done for an average of 5 minutes.
When the therapy is finished the therapist will disconnect the vacuum effect and remove the cups from the affected area.
The patient will be left with round shaped bruises on the skin, however they are not painful and not permanent.
These bruises are part of the healing process and will disappear within 2-6 weeks

Benefits of Cupping

There are many benefits to cupping therapy, the most common one is decreasing pain and tension in the muscles and also to detox the muscles at cellular level
The vacuum suction effect that is created is believed to draw up all of the toxins and free radicals from the muscle which may be causing pain, such as lactic acid, and bring it to the surface skin layer, where your body will then break it down and remove it.
By sucking it up out of the muscle cells, this allows a new influx of healing mediators and blood flow to come into the muscles and connective tissues and promote the healing process.
Cupping therapy is widely used in professional athletes, where you see many athletes sporting proudly fresh cupping bruises on television. It is a very common rehab tool among many sports and athletes.

Dynamic cupping is used in many clinical settings where it used to help the therapist break down scar tissue and muscle adhesions by moving the cup in different positions like massage techniques.
The suction of the cup and the movement help work the muscle fibres in a different way that normal hands on massage could in some presentation.
This therapy may give you a longer sweeping type of bruising, which doesn't last as long as the static cupping and is lighter red/pink in colour, compared the dark purple of the static cupping.

Cupping has helped people with the following

Painful and sore muscles
Chronic muscle stiffness
Acute muscle pain
Lactic acid build up
Scar tissue management
Osteoarthritis
Rheumatoid arthritis
Fibromyalgia
Migraine headaches
Tension type headaches

The British Cupping Society says that cupping therapy is used to treat:

Blood disorders such as anemia and hemophilia
Skin problems such as eczema and acne
Bronchial congestion caused by allergies and asthma
High blood pressure
Varicose veins
A 2012 Chinese Australian study published that after 135 cases of cupping helped with the above mentioned conditions plus cervical spondylosis and facial paralysis.
2015 Report published in The Journal of Traditional and Complementary Medicine concluded that cupping helped with acne, herpes zoster and pain management.