Chinese Medicine Gua Sha 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: So, normally the cups would be left on longer than this but we're going to go ahead and remove them. You just break the seal and the cups come off easily because we want to show you another technique. Sometimes with cupping though, you may experience some bruising and that's natural with cupping because it can be quite aggressive depending on your practitioner but what we like to do is show you something called "Gua Sha." SIG HAUER: And Gua Sha, you use something that has a nice smooth edge to it and you want a smooth edge so that you don't scratch the skin. Gua Sha literally means "sand scraping." And it's very similar to cupping in that what we're trying to do is draw toxins out. And we would spread some oil on an area and then go over the area repeatedly and typically in this area where I'm Gua Shaing here, I'm going to move generally in a down or inward or outward motion. Usually, I wouldn't move up but repeated scraping this way. And that will also help draw out toxins and the same result can happen and that you may see some discoloration in the skin, possibly a little bruising, but it's a good thing and that it is drawing toxins out of the body. So, this is Gua Shaing, and I'm just doing a short period of time. Quite often we may do the whole upper shoulders and back area and we may do it for five to ten minutes. It's just depending on what we see needs to happen in there. So that's Gua Sha."