Even though I’ve been living in Vancouver for decades, that’s not where I first learned about or experienced the Chinese therapy called cupping. In fact, it was in Moscow Russia over 30 years ago, that I first experienced cupping therapy. My mother and I were visiting my brother, who was living in Russia at the time. All the traveling had taken its toll on my body, and I caught a nasty chest cold. To make a long story short, I received cupping on my upper back, and I was surprised when the treatment opened up my lungs, reduced the phlegm and cleared up my cough. From that one experience, I was sold, and now use cupping to help my patients with a variety of conditions.
If you’ve never heard of cupping, right about now you may be wondering what I’m talking about, so let me explain. Cupping is a Chinese medical therapy that uses suction to promote healing. It’s often used on musculoskeletal injuries, as the suction creates a pulling affect and acts a little like a reverse massage. However, because cupping also helps the lymph system, can be also used for lung issues, such as cough, bronchitis, pneumonia and the like.
There are a lot of nuances to cupping, depending on the location and condition that I’m treating. As a result, I use different kinds of cups to suit the needs of my patients.
Glass Cups/Fire Cupping
This is the closest technique to what the ancient Chinese used, however instead of glass, they used bamboo or horn for the cups. Today we use class cups that come in a variety of sizes. To create a vacuum, a cotton ball held by tweezers or hemostats is soaked in alcohol and lit. The lit cotton is then held inside the cup for a few seconds which removes all the air. The fire is removed and the cup is quickly placed on the skin, creating suction. When performing fire cupping, the strength of the suction is controlled by how long I keep the fire in the cup before placing it. While this may sound like a recipe for a burn, it is actually quite safe when done by a trained and experienced practitioner. The fire never comes near my patient’s skin, and the fire isn’t near the cup long enough to heat it up—it simply sucks the air out.
Silicone Cups
These are soft cups in which the vacuum is created simply by pinching or squeezing them closed before placement. As the cup expands back to its original shape it creates the suction. Silicone cups are simple enough to use at home.
Plastic Cups with a Pump
These cups usually come in a set of various sizes and include a small pump. The suction is created by attaching the pump to a small gasket at the top of the cup to pull out the air once the cup is in place.
Which Cups when?
There are a couple of factors that I take into account when deciding what kinds of cups I want to use on a patient. For some conditions, I have found that a technique called sliding (or moving or gliding) cupping is beneficial. This involves moistening the skin with massage oil before placing the cups. Once the cups are placed, I’m able to slide them back and forth over a treatment area. This can be especially effective for relieving lower back pain, muscle tension and conditions that involve large muscles, like pulls, strains or spasms, as sliding the cups acts a little bit like deep tissue massage. A typical cupping session, whether sliding or non-moving cups lasts about a half hour.
I like to use glass cups when stronger suction is necessary, especially while moving the cups across the skin. Also, when I’m applying a lot of cups over the area, such as along both sides of your spine (a common practice) glass cups are the quickest to apply and provide strong suction.
Silicone cups are gentler than glass or plastic cups. They’re easy to apply and maintain enough suction to glide the cups. However, because the cups are soft, they’re good to use on tender areas where I need more control of the suction. Because they’re easy to apply, soft, and good to use on tender areas, I sometimes send these cups home with a patient to use on places like their IT band, muscle strains or on their upper chest to treat lung conditions.
I don’t use plastic cups as frequently as I do glass or silicone. They take a little longer to place and they aren’t as comfortable for sliding. However, I use them to treat places that are harder to maintain a vacuum, like your neck, ankle or wrists. I find that with the pump I can control the suction more, as plastic cups are held in place while I create the vacuum.
The beauty of cupping is that it’s a great adjunct to acupuncture and herbal medicine. The cups increase circulation to the area being treated, which helps to reduce inflammation and speed the healing process. If you’ve never heard of cupping before, it’s good to know that often, depending on the strength of the vacuum created, cupping will leave a mark. The mark looks a lot like a perfectly round bruise and comes from the small capillaries near the surface of the skin being broken. And while this sounds like a bad thing, the marks are actually a sign that a microtrauma has occurred, which your body mobilizes to heal. In doing so, it also speeds up healing of the underlying condition. Like a bruise, the cupping marks go away in five to ten days.
It’s interesting to see how the use of cupping has grown. When I first began practicing cupping in Vancouver in 2003, many of my patients had never heard of this kind of therapy. However, with the help of a lot of media attention, being in such a multicultural city as Vancouver, and living in an area with so many opportunities to engage in your favorite sport(s), many people are aware of the benefits of cupping and actually seek it out. If you’d like to know more about cupping and how it might help you, please contact me.
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Dr. Jeda Boughton is a Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Registered Acupuncturist in Vancouver. She is also a Registered Herbologist and the founder of BodaHealth.
