Aldergrove Cupping Therapy

About Our Aldergrove Cupping Therapy

Cupping is an incredibly powerful technique for healing many different conditions.

Popularized by professional athletes for recovery from sports-related injury, it also has remarkable effects on enhancing immune function, and has been used for centuries to overcome  colds, flus, reduce fever, and facilitate general detoxification and good health. Outstanding for both therapeutic purposes.

What’s involved in our Aldergrove Cupping Therapy, and why do it? How can it affect pain, injury, stiffness, or even numbness? 

Essentially I look at cupping as a way of cleaning the tissue. This is a divergence from the more common description, which explains cupping as a way to remove qi and blood stagnation, and to “bring blood to the area”. While it’s true that cupping brings circulation to the area cupped, and it does resolve blood stagnation, I think that looking at it from the perspective of cleaning the tissue is an important aspect of understanding cupping and how it fits into a therapeutic regimen.

Why is this so? In general, when an area of the body is first cupped, the colouring will be much more pronounced, dense, and darker in hue, and will trend more towards black, blue and purple. As subsequent cupping sessions are applied, the colour will trend towards red or pink, and the density, and saturation of colour will get progressively lighter and lighter, until the tissue stops colouring altogether. 

Because this trend towards lighter and lighter colour generally corresponds to a lessening or elimination of symptoms such as pain, numbness and stiffness, it’s reasonable to conclude that whatever is causing the tissue to colour after cupping, is being removed by the process, and that whatever them material is, is causing the symptoms. 

This fits with the classical TCM theory that blood and qi stagnation are responsible for pain and abnormal sensation. What colour does old, stagnant blood generally have? Dark blue and purple right?

But if the cupping were pulling blood out of the vessels or actually bruising the tissue, you would expect the tissue to get progressively more damaged and bruised by regular cupping wouldn’t you?

Since it’s actually the opposite that occurs, we can reasonably conclude that the cups are not actually bruising the tissue, and are not really pulling blood out of the vessels, but rather they are extracting something from the tissue itself that has some relationship with the venous, or de-oxygenated blood, on the drainage side of one’s circulation.

What gives venous blood it’s colour? It’s in part the appearance of normal blood in the absence of oxygen, which you can see yourself by looking at the blue colour of your normal, healthy veins. But the venous blood also carries some of the wastes that the body will eventually eliminate.

If you had a group of tissues that had retained some of these wastes, and residues from the venous circulation, you would expect that they are not going to function properly, or heal efficiently if they are saturated with their own waste products. An analogy would be a city or community that was not getting it’s garbage picked up, or didn’t have effective sewers and sanitization. Obviously it would not be long before the community was unhealthy or unliveable. 

For your cellular communities, whether it’s the soft tissues of your biceps, your hips, neck or back, really good, strong healing depends upon their environment being clean and healthy.

Our Aldergrove Cupping Therapy is a beautifully simple, and time tested way of cleaning tissues and thereby removing obstructions to fresh, healthy circulation, so that the tissue can get what it needs to heal and have it’s full vitality and function renewed.