It’s about a five- to 10-minute process that, according to cupping advocates, activates a person’s Qi, or what traditional Chinese medicine practitioners describe as an individual’s life force. You don’t have the pain associate with the massage.
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During the therapy cups are placed on the section of the body in need of fix to create suction. “And everybody knows a hickey doesn’t hurt”.
“The reason these Olympic swimmers and all these athletes you see are doing it is basically to speed recovery”, Dr. Nick Winters at the Center for Spine and Sports Medicine said. The cups are then placed on the skin and can be placed on different muscle groups.
The long-term effect of repeated cupping therapy is not known but is generally believed to be safe.
Rummage disagreed, claiming there is “pretty good research on top of pretty good anecdotal evidence that if you use it properly, it works really well”.
Some scientific judges are giving poor scores for the efficacy of cupping, a pain-relief therapy that’s been drawing attention at the Olympics because of its use by athletes, including American gold medal swimmer Michael Phelps. He completed four years of acupuncture training at Jung Tao School for Classical Chinese Medicine near Boone. Naddour showed a cupping mark on his shoulder while Coughlin posted a photo of her with glasses on her back. “Even though it causes a little bit of bruising, it actually helps your body break up deeper bruises that have been caused by trauma”, such as surgery.
The director also said that cupping is used to treat fatigue or skin diseases like eczema.
Cupping originated from the Middle Eastern, and it’s the Ancient therapy that Olympic athletes, such as Michael Phelps, are using to relax their muscles.
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While there are no laws against cupping, Summers cautions that other potential medical issues should be cleared first, before cupping is performed. “You want to do everything you can to flush the lactic acid out”.
