Chinese Medicine Cupping Treatment

Video Transcript

"SARAH HAUER: Hi. I'm Sarah Hauer. SIG HAUER: And I'm Sig Hauer, and we're professional practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine. SARAH HAUER: We're here on behalf of Expert Village. SIG HAUER: And welcome to our video. SARAH HAUER: I'd like to move on and show you demonstrate what cupping is in Chinese medicine. And I'm going to cup over some shoulder points for neck and shoulder tension and tightness. SIG HAUER: What Sarah is going to use is a modern cupping device. There's the traditional style of cupping where you spread some alcohol in the inside of the cup, light it, and put it down quickly, and that creates a vacuum. We've gone to this because we have had some patients that have a little concern about us lighting fires near their hair or near their skin or something like that so we'll just go with the safe way. This is a device that will create some suction. So if you can see, she's raising the skin up into the cup and what this will do is help draw toxins out of the muscles, tendons, ligaments, et cetera. And if she wanted to, she could also--if she had put some massage oil or Po Sum On oil on first, you can move the cup around a little bit and kind of use it to do a wider area. But this is another traditional way of treating people. It's just by putting the cup right over a particular point that's a problem, and at that point where she's putting at that small intestine 14, people quite commonly have a lot of tension there. SARAH HAUER: Is that comfortable, Gina? GINA: Uh-huh. SARAH HAUER: So the walking cup is usually what Sig was referring to where we move the cups across the back, we usually do that when there aren't needles in, so we're not... SIG HAUER: Right. SARAH HAUER: ...gonna demonstrate that today because we already have needles on the rest of her back. So these are stationary cups and these are actually used in a lot of different medicines; the cupping, you may have heard of it before, it has been quite common in other ancient medicines. In Chinese medicine, we use it to restore muscles and to pull out like the gas but we also use it to pull out toxins. So if you're beginning to get a cold or flu, we'll use these over specific points."