Ba Guan: The use of Cupping in the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM)

By Grit Nusser and Xiaoying Shang

For more than 3000 Years Ba Guan or the Cupping is an important part of the national medicine in many cultures.

The blood circulation is improved, muscle pain and tensions are relieved, the pores of the skin are opened and the formation of sweat leads to inner detoxification. The balance between Yin and Yang is established.

This book does not claim to replace the doctor or the non-medical practitioner, but it is a simple and useful guide as you can use Ba Guan in many complaints.

This method is - if following the rules - simple, safe, inexpensive, very successful and helps to prevent, relieve or support a prescribed therapy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Sep 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9783752874730

Grit Nusser

Grit Nusser, Sozialpädagogin und Heilpraktikerin. Sie beschäftigte sich während ihrer Zeit als Heilpraktikerin intensiv mit der Naturheilkunde und gab ihr Wissen auch im Unterricht weiter. Während ihrer Aufenthalte in Xi'an, China, lernte die Autorin verschiedenen Massagetechniken wie TuiNaAnMo und Gua Sha kennen und schätzen.

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Ba Guan or Cupping

For more than 2000 Years Ba Guan (Cupping) has been an important field in the exterior medicine (waizhi) of the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) contrary to the interior medicine (naizhi) with the use of medicine made of plants, animals or minerals, based on the wholistic view of TCM. If following the rules this method is simple, safe, inexpensive and very successful.

It is known that in the ancient Greece there was Telephorus, the god of Cupping but also in Mesopotamia, India and South-America as well as in the western world cupping has been for more than 3000 years a usual part of the folk medicine. You can find it for instance in Films like ‘Dance of Vampires’ by Roman Polanski or in ‘Alexis Sorbas’. The cow horn has been the guild sign of the barber-surgeon. Cow horns were polished / grounded in a round shape, heated and placed on the aching parts of the body.

In this book I mainly deal with the usual methods of imagination, rules and application possibilities in the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), but I will also, for the sake of completeness, describe the roots of cupping from the western point of view.

What means TCM?

The beginning of the traditional Chinese medicine stood in close relationship to the environment of the country. The life of the inhabitants was focussed on the nature and so they tried to analyse the nature process and to integrate the rules of it into her own life. The northern part of China is colder and so the soil is partly almost very infertile. That is why the acupuncture and the moxibustion was developed and the massage too. Moxibustion is a heat therapy based on healing with mugwort (Artemisia Vulgaris) which grows there abundantly.

The southern part of China was warmer and there were a lot of plants, roots, leaves or barks, which were used to cure diseases by the inhabitants.

At the time of the ‘yellow emperor’ both methods were merged together.

‘To take medicine after starting of illness is as if digging a well when you are thirsty, or to forge weapons after the fight has started.‘ (Nei ching)

The traditional Chinese medicine wants more than healing. It tries to sustain health. So it is written in the Nei ching, the great work of the famous ‘yellow emperor’ Huang Di (2698 – 2598?? B.C.): The real doctor (medical practitioner) takes care for someone before getting ill.

In the old China doctors (medical practitioners) were not paid for recovering, but they were paid for maintaining health.

In the Chinese language the word TAO is used for the indescribable, infinite deep universe. For humans inconceivable and incomprehensible and a deep unknown secret

The TCM shows the human beings as part of the whole life merged with the nature and merged with the universe. So the human life is also influenced by rain, sun, wind, the stars, the tides as well as warmth and cold.

The basis of TCM is the idea that the human body is a micro image of the universe and that microcosm and macrocosm is one, all based on defined logical rules: 'as in the big, so in the small'. These rules are valid for the whole cosmos, for plants, humans and animals up to the tiniest cells. This wholistic view has an influence on the suggestion about disease and their reason.

The symbol of TAO is a circle and it stands for the beginning of existence.

‘Yin and Yang’ stand