Tuesday, 26 May 2009

Can Dry Cupping be a Diagnosis Method for Wet Cupping (hijama)?


Let me start this post with a couple of slightly odd hypothetical questions:

- If due to some strange accident, you got bruised in several (say half a dozen) places on your back, and the bruises were all equal in shape & colour, wouldn't you except them to heal / fade away all at the same rate (say within the next few days or so)?

- And if they didn't fade away at the same speed, would that then tell you something about different parts of your back (and maybe the organs and the blood flow underneath the site of the bruises)?

Now coming back to the title of this post:
Can Dry Cupping be a Diagnosis Method for Wet Cupping (hijama)?

If you look at the photo, you can see six dry-cupping marks on the back. The strange thing is, although they were all made at the same time from a recent dry cupping session, after a couple of days they are at different intensities. As per my initial question above, it would be logical to assume that all the marks will fade away at the same speed. However we see couple of the marks much darker, and couple of them have already started fading away.

A simple way to interpret this would be:
The areas with the darker bruises probably have poorer blood circulation than the lighter ones, and therefore are the ideal sites to perform hijama (wet-cupping), to drain out some of the stagnated blood and hopefully improve and increase blood-circulation to those areas.

And after doing the required hijama, it would also be idea to then carry out dry-cupping again say 2 months later, and see if there is any difference in the 'fading-away' rate of the bruises. If this time round, they fade quicker and more evenly (ie all 'bruises' fade at the same speed), then it may prove that your hijama treatment had a result!

So there you are, as well as being a separate therapy in its own right, above is a simple illustration how dry-cupping can be a diagnosis tool for wet-cupping (aka blood-cupping or hijama)

All fascinating stuff, I hope you will agree! And if you are a therapist who uses or have used dry-cupping as a diagnostic method in this way, then please share your experience by leaving a comment* below. Similarly as a patient, if you have had this sort of thing done, then again your comments* will be much appreciated.

Shuaib
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If you are a hijama therapist or patient and are happy to share your knowledge or experience via a guest blog-post, please send me an email to: hijama.mail@gmail.com.

*Comments are moderated to prevent spamming so may take some time to appear