How to Perform Gua Sha

Learning to perform Gua Sha can promote normal blood circulation and metabolic activity in the body. Gua Sha is a healing technique of traditional Chinese medicine that involves stimulating the skin to rid the body of impurities. Practitioners also perform Gua Sha on a patient who has acute or chronic pain with symptoms of achy, tender or knotted muscles.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

1. Apply normal pressure to the patient's skin using your fingertips. If your fingertips leave marks on the surface of the skin that fade away slowly, this reveals the need to have a practitioner perform Gua Sha.

2. Lubricate the area where you will perform Gua Sha. Peanut oil is traditionally used, but any lubricant that gives patients a feeling of peace will do.

3. Stroke the skin by applying pressure with a round-edged instrument. The instrument can be specially designed to perform Gua Sha, or something similar to a large ladle or soup spoon.

4. Perform Gua Sha with the instrument to see if you can create a small red area of raised petechiae, or small raised bumps, on the surface of the skin. This is known as Sha. If there are no petechiae on the skin's surface, then there is no blood stasis and the manipulated skin will simply turn pink.

5. Analyze the color of the petechiae to give a proper diagnosis of the Sha. Light colored Sha means a blood deficiency, purple or black Sha indicates blood stasis, brown Sha means dry blood and dark, red Sha indicates heat.

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