About Traditional Chinese Medicine

Gua sha (Chinese: 刮痧), or kerokan (in Indonesia), is a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practice in which a tool is used to scrape people's skin in order to produce light petechiae. Practitioners believe that gua sha releases unhealthy bodily matter from blood stasis within sore, tired, stiff, or injured muscle areas to stimulate new oxygenated blood flow to the areas, thus promoting metabolic cell repair, regeneration, healing, and recovery.

Gua sha is sometimes referred to as "scraping", "spooning" or "coining" by English speakers. The treatment has also been known by the French name, tribo-effleurage.[1] Gua sha has no known health benefits and can have adverse effects, some of them potentially serious.[2]

Etymology

Gua sha, the literal translation being "to scrape petechia" which refers to the sand-like bruising after the treatment, spread from China to Vietnam, where it became very popular. It is known as cạo gió, which roughly means "to scrape wind", as in Vietnamese culture "catching a cold" or fever is often referred to as trúng gió, "to catch wind". The origin of this term is the Shang Han Lun, a c. 220 CE Chinese medical text on illness caused by cold. As in most Asian countries, China's medical sciences were a profound influence in Vietnam, especially between the 5th and 7th centuries CE.[3] Cạo gió is an extremely common remedy in Vietnam and for expatriate Vietnamese.

Technique

Gua sha involves repeated pressed strokes over lubricated skin with a smooth-edged, blunt instrument. Skin is typically lubricated with massage oil or balm, and commonly a ceramic Chinese soup spoon was used, or a blunt, well-worn coin, even honed animal bones, water buffalo horn, or jade, or even a simple metal cap with a blunt rounded edge is used.

In cases of fatigue from heavy manual labor work, a piece of ginger root soaked in rice wine is sometimes used to rub down the spine from top to bottom.

The smooth edge is placed against the oiled skin surface, pressed down firmly, and then moved down the muscles—hence the term tribo-effleurage (i.e., friction-stroking)—or along the pathway of the acupuncture meridians, along the surface of the skin, with each stroke being about 4–6 inches long.

Practitioners tend to follow the tradition they were taught to obtain sha: typically using either gua sha or fire cupping. The techniques are sometimes used together.[4] In China, both gua sha and fire cupping are widely available in institutions ranging from national and public hospitals to private massage shops. Due to local peoples' deep trust in Traditional Chinese medicine and the treatments' reasonable price, both are very popular.[citation needed]