Recently, a post about this past Summer Olympics showed up on one of my various social media news-feeds. Unsurprisingly, it was Michael Phelps. In it, he had those round marks all over him like we saw quite a few athletes bearing during those games, left there from the physical therapy technique called cupping therapy. Cupping therapy isn’t a new thing, though it has recently been experiencing a revitalized popularity; it dates back so far that there are records of the ancient Egyptians using it in 1,550 B.C. This therapy technique involves placing special cups on a person’s body, using heat or air to create suction. Many people use it to relieve pain, help with inflammations, blood flow, or as simply a deep-tissue massage. In all methods of cupping therapy (dry, wet, flash, moving, needling, etc.) a therapist lights a flammable substance inside a cup and as the fire goes out, places the cup upside down on the patient’s skin. A vacuum is created by the air cooling inside, which causes the blood vessels to expand and the skin to rise and turn red (that’s the red circles we saw covering all those athletes). Sometimes, a rubber pump is used to cause the suction instead of fire. Now, we have the anecdotal reports of many Olympic athletes, as well as quite a few celebrities, who claim that cupping therapy really works to help relieve them of stress, soreness, and other ailments. However, I wanted to find some actual research to support their claims. I mean, the method has been around for thousands of years right? So it has to have some truth and effectiveness behind it.
I found one study that focused specifically on how traditional cupping therapy effects people who suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS). CTS is a condition caused by a pinched nerve in the wrist that leads to numbness, tingling, and other such things in the hands and arms. This study was a randomized, controlled, open trial that involved 52 CTS patients who ranged in age all the way from 18 to 70 and who met certain required criteria. 52 is a rather small sample size, which I did not really like to see. Before the trial itself started, each participant went through a physical examination and were told to fill out a questionnaire sheet. Then, the participants were each randomly assigned to one of two groups, wet cupping or local thermal therapy (the control group). The former group went through one treatment of wet cupping, and the control had one local application of heat over their trapezius muscle. Seven days after the treatment, the researchers performed a follow-up.
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e results showed that cupping therapy was very significantly more beneficial to the patients than the heat treatment. There was also a lessened amount of disability in daily life among the patients who underwent the cupping method, as well as a lower amount of neck pain, which they had all suffered from at the start of the trial. The results did take into account that around 80% of the patients in both of the groups though that their respective treatments were going to be effective and statistical adjustment for this didn’t change the outcomes. So, it cannot be said that the results were due to the patients’ expectation bias.
Another study, this one also a randomized control trial, was done in Taiwan. The researchers’ goal was to study how effective cupping therapy is for relieving chronic neck and shoulder pain. On a personal note, being someone who has suffered for quite a while with intense neck and shoulder pain, I would love to try out cupping therapy. This study was done as a single-blind experiment in which 60 people (another unfortunately small sample size) were randomly assigned to two different groups. The first group, the cupping group, received fire cupping therapy at three acupuncture points on their shoulders and necks. The control group, on the other hand, was simply told to rest for 20 minutes. This, to me, does not seem like a very effective way to conduct an experiment. The results of this study did show a significant relief of pain in the neck and shoulders due to the cupping therapy, which lends to the support of cupping as an acceptable complementary treatment for pain and other ailments. However, we do have to keep in mind that while the results were significant, this study was done with only 60 people. Results are always, always more reliable when a sample size is bigger.
Because the sample size for the first study was only 52 and the sample for the second was 60, I cannot confidently say that the results of these studies are decent enough proof of cupping therapy effectiveness. There are quite a handful of anecdotal reports that support cupping, and very few reports that do not support it. However the research just is not definitive enough for me. I would need to see better, and larger tests done to really make a statement supporting or rejecting cupping therapy.
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