You may have noticed them during the Olympics or even at your local gym – athletes with red circular bruises on their skin. Those marks are the signature sign of cupping therapy. Blake Dean, PT, a physical therapist with Avera Therapy explains how this suction therapy technique helps promote healing and recovery.
What is cupping therapy?
Cupping therapy is an ancient technique that's really kind of found a lot of favor over the past, I would say 10 to 20 years. The biggest thing that it does is that it pulls skin, fascia, and muscle tissue away from the bone to kind of promote healing and reduce inflammation. So really what’s helped it find favor in recent years is the fact that it can be used kind of as an adjunct to manual therapy services on top of the fact that they really have been able to find solid evidence to support that tissue does change with using cupping therapy.
What type of patient is this therapy for?
Really, anybody that comes in with musculoskeletal injuries and or pain. Post-operatively, people can have a lot of muscle guarding and tissue irritation and inflammation. So really we’re just trying to get people in and to help reduce all of that. It can be anybody from your high-level athlete to a post-operative patient. Anyone that has a lot of inflammation or even any small areas of swelling, those people can really benefit from cupping in terms of pain reduction and really to stimulate the healing process.
What are the common side effects with cupping therapy?
The biggest thing is the kind of dark bruise circles on the skin. It's not really a true bruise and they do resolve after a few days. You do see it a lot in the high-level athletes, but that's kind of the big one that people will find. Those dark circles can be seen wherever the treatments area and they do resolve after a few days. There can also be some discomfort also with cupping as the cup itself is on the skin and also skin irritation to some degree. Maybe some redness or things like that on the skin, but for the most part those issues or the things that people have after cupping do resolve after a period of a couple days.
What do you want prospective patients to be aware of?
Probably the biggest thing is that less is more when it comes to cupping. A lot of times people will see 15 to 20 cups on an athlete at a time which is a significant amount of bruise marks that you see in the high level athletes. Really our goal in therapy is more to create as much tissue change as possible. A lot of times we can do that with one or two cups to that degree. We can then pair that a lot of times with movement on top of other things. So whether we're moving the cup or that we're putting them on the patient and having them move the cups themselves, that's really the biggest thing takeaway. We are not just putting a cup on somebody and leaving it to there for 10 to 15 minutes, that is where you see those high level bruises. Really our goal at the end of the day is to create tissue change and to cause people to move better and feel better in that way.
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