Therapy of the future

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-01 09:40

Cupping is an ancient therapeutic practice, which was depicted in paintings inscribed on the walls of King Tutankhamun's tomb built thousands of years ago. It was also practiced by Assyrians, Chinese, Japanese, Arabs as well as Europeans many centuries ago.

American medical students learn cupping from Chinese doctors at a Shanghai hospital.

In recent years, cupping has returned as a cure within the framework of so-called "non-traditional medicine". However, its controversial methods of practice take different forms.

Doaa Mahgoub, a physician at the Emergency Unit of King Abdulaziz University hospital in Saudi Arabia's Western city of Jeddah, says that sucking impure blood follows the same traditional methods used in Saudi Arabia and other Arab and Islamic countries thousands of years ago.

"East Asian countries including China and Japan practice cupping in a different way," Mahgoub says.

She adds that dry cupping or the use of air cups is widespread in mountainous areas where people are liable to suffer clotting due to high blood density.

Cupping, known in the past as blood sacrifice, was a means of protecting those people from blood clotting, as recorded in medical registers of the Arabs more than 1,400 years ago.

Mahgoub pointed out that this primitive method is still practiced in some areas in Saudi Arabia. It depends on using elephant horns imported from India.

There are three types of cupping according to Mahgoub: dry cupping, impure blood sucking and massage cupping.

She says that Sheikh Ahmad Hefny is accredited with having revived the third type of cupping in Egypt through strict measures established to protect both the patient and the cupper. Disposable instruments are used each time.

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