it doesnt matter on whether they believe it or not, the placebo effect is the act of tricking your brain into thinking it, its your sub conscious brain that releases any endorphins and dopamine etc not the conscious brain, the conscious brain actually does very little, even what you per sieve as conscious thought processes your subconscious brain has actually already thought about it, the fact is, you actually have very little control of your own brain and body

Sorry, it's not even close to a proper study. They're having something new & fairly invasive done to them compared to something that they already are familiar with. Other than placebo, explain to me how coining or cupping works. Is your understanding of science Medieval enough to believe that this bullshit pulls poisons out of the body ?

^^^ Who said anything about pulling poisons out of the body?

I thought it had more to do with blood flow.


I'd be interested to hear LTO's thoughts on coining and/or cupping.

Nobody here said it. I've heard Chinese medicine practitioners claim it many times w/cupping.

wackyjacky wrote:Sorry, it's not even close to a proper study. They're having something new & fairly invasive done to them compared to something that they already are familiar with. Other than placebo, explain to me how coining or cupping works. Is your understanding of science Medieval enough to believe that this bullshit pulls poisons out of the body ?

We're not talking cupping here , the studies refer to gua sha. That is a perfectly good RCT, check the criteria here. http://www.sign.ac.uk/methodology/checklists.html

However here's how it works. Basically the tissue damage elicits an anti inflammatory and immune response:

In the last decade, research has begun to clarify how gua sha works. Gua sha’s therapeutic petechiae represents blood cells that have extravasated in the capillary bed, and measure as a significant increase in surface microperfusion [1]. As this blood is reabsorbed, the breakdown of hemoglobin upregulates HO-1, CO, biliverdin and bilirubin, which are anti-inflammatory and cytoprotective [5]. Studies show the anti-inflammatory effect of gua sha has a therapeutic impact in inflammatory conditions, such as active chronic hepatitis, where liver inflammation indicates organ breakdown that over time can lead to premature death [8]. The physiology of HO-1 may also explain gua sha’s anti-inflammatory effect in other responsive clinical conditions, such as fever, cough, asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, mastitis [14], gastritis, musculoskeletal and other painful conditions presenting as neck pain [13], back pain, migraine [10], postherpetic neuralgia [11], and others. That gua sha has anti-inflammatory and immune stimulation properties is important for providers to understand and to be able to communicate to their patients as well as other health care providers. *

Gua sha’s immune and anti-inflammatory effect: heme oxygenase-1

Providers familiar with gua sha know that it can reduce a fever and alter the course of an acute infectious illness, as well as reduce inflammatory symptoms in chronic illness. A group at Harvard used bioluminescent imaging with a mouse, and showed that gua sha upregulates gene expression for an enzyme that is an anti-oxidant and cytoprotectant, heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1), at multiple internal organ sites immediately after treatment and over a period of days following gua sha treatment [4].

HO-1 and its catalysates (biliverdin, bilirubin and carbon monoxide (CO)) exhibit not only anti-oxidative but also anti-inflammatory effects [5]. For example, augmentation of HO-1 expression attenuates allergic inflammation. HO-1 plays a protective role in allergic disease in part by inhibiting Th2 cell-specific chemokines [5]. This work by Kwong’s group is the first to show an immediate and sustained immune response from a traditional East Asian modality that has direct relevance in the healing of ‘internal organ’ and inflammatory problems.

It is also known that HO-1 regulates cell cycle and anti-smooth muscle hyperplasia, providing protection in many disease models, such as asthma, organ transplant rejection, inflammatory bowel disease and experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, even though the immune pathological mechanisms of these diseases are dissimilar [5]. http://www.pacificcollege.edu/acupunctu ... a-sha.html

Here's an explanation that makes sense to me and sites your study: "Gua Sha “blemishes” can look frightful – more like the result of torture than of treatment. Yet with our current craze for all things exotic in medicine, Gua Sha is becoming popular also in Western countries. One German team has even published several RCTs of Gua Sha.

This group treated 40 patients with neck pain either with Gua Sha or locally applied heat packs. They found that, after one week, the pain was significantly reduced in the former compared to the latter group. The same team also published a study with 40 back or neck-pain patients who either received a single session of Gua Sha or were left untreated. The results indicate that one week later, the treated patients had less pain than the untreated ones.

My favoutite article on the subject must be a case report by the same German research team. It describes a woman suffering from chronic headaches. She was treated with a range of interventions, including Gua Sha – and her symptoms improved. From this course of events, the authors conclude that “this case provides first evidence that Gua Sha is effective in the treatment of headaches”

The truth, of course, is that neither this case nor the two RCTs provide any good evidence at all. The case-report is, in fact, a classic example of drawing hilariously over-optimistic conclusions from data that are everything but conclusive. And the two RCTs just show how remarkable placebo-effects can be, particularly if the treatment is exotic, impressive, involves physical touch, is slightly painful and raises high expectations.

My explanation for the observed effects after Gua Sha is quite simple: imagine you have a headache and accidentally injure yourself – say you fall off your bike and the tarmac scrapes off an area of skin on your thigh. This hurts quite a bit and distracts you from your headache, perhaps even to such an extend that you do not feel it any more. As the wound heals, it gets a bit infected and thus hurts for several days; chances are that your headache will be gone for that period of time. Of course, the Gua Sha- effect would be larger because the factors mentioned above (exotic treatment, expectation etc.) but essentially the accident and the treatment work via similar mechanisms, namely distraction and counter-irritation. And neither Gua Sha nor injuring yourself on the tarmac are truly recommendable therapies, in my view." LINK: http://edzardernst.com/2013/01/gua-sha- ... treatment/

But surely, for the patient, it does not matter how she gets rid of her headache! The main point is that Gua Sha works! In a way, this attitude is understandable – except, we do not need the hocus pocus of meridians, qi, TCM, ancient wisdom etc. nor do we need to tolerate claims that Gua Sha is “serious medicine” and has any specific effects whatsoever. All we do need is to apply some common sense and then use any other method of therapeutic counter-irritation; that might be more honest, safer and would roughly do the same trick.

i'm on the fence, i kinda understand the science Kuroneko is putting forward, but i think with the cambodians arent having it done for the science reasons, its more about what they believe, hense why i favor the more placebo/distraction theory, i cant see how the rubbing can have such a strong effect as mentioned in the scientific theory, most of my friends who get sick and have the bruising tend to be sick just as long as a person would normally be 3-5 days, and so i dont think the rubbing has any real effect on the body other than a mental one, if you put the body through pain, you brain will send off feel good endorphines to distract the body of pain, i think this is doing something simular

That of course is one GPs opinion not substantiated by study. From the same article you cite:

Some view gua sha as folk medicine, but the scientific research community may beg to differ! Researchers from institutions like Harvard and Beth Israel Medical Center are demonstrating both efficacy as well as offering insight on why gua sha works. A study published in a 2011 edition of Pain Medicine demonstrated that gua sha decreased pain for chronic neck pain sufferers, noting that “neck pain severity after 1 week improved significantly better in the gua sha group compared with the control group (heat therapy).”

Researchers have used various techniques, including Doppler images, to show that microcirculation is indeed increased in the treated area, therefore decreasing both local and distal areas of pain. In the mice model, gua sha was shown to influence an enzyme (Heme Oxygenase-1) that has a protective antioxidative effect in the cells. An interesting case study showed gua sha decreases inflammatory markers of a patient with liver injury due to Hepatitis B, suggesting gua sha may even have a protective effect on the liver. As is the case for most healing modalities in Eastern Medicine, modern science has yet again validated the effectiveness of this ancient technique.
http://edzardernst.com/2013/01/gua-sha- ... treatment/

Whatever your view of the process the above effects have been documented.

With respect to cupping there is scant evidence for its efficacy. See this review:

An updated review of the efficacy of cupping therapy. Cao H1, Li X, Liu J.

BACKGROUND:
Since 1950, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) cupping therapy has been applied as a formal modality in hospitals throughout China and elsewhere in the world. Based on a previous systematic literature review of clinical studies on cupping therapy, this study presents a thorough review of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate the therapeutic effect of cupping therapy.

METHOD:
Six databases were searched for articles published through 2010. RCTs on cupping therapy for various diseases were included. Studies on cupping therapy combined with other TCM treatments versus non-TCM therapies were excluded.

RESULTS:
135 RCTs published from 1992 through 2010 were identified. The studies were generally of low methodological quality. Diseases for which cupping therapy was commonly applied were herpes zoster, facial paralysis (Bell palsy), cough and dyspnea, acne, lumbar disc herniation, and cervical spondylosis. Wet cupping was used in most trials, followed by retained cupping, moving cupping, and flash cupping. Meta-analysis showed cupping therapy combined with other TCM treatments was significantly superior to other treatments alone in increasing the number of cured patients with herpes zoster, facial paralysis, acne, and cervical spondylosis. No serious adverse effects were reported in the trials.

CONCLUSIONS:
Numerous RCTs on cupping therapy have been conducted and published during the past decades. This review showed that cupping has potential effect in the treatment of herpes zoster and other specific conditions. However, further rigorously designed trials on its use for other conditions are warranted. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22389674

I've used homeopathy. I don't believe in it. Yet it worked.

For the coining, I always thought that it was a question of displacing the pain, but who knows.

In the end, as long as it works, who cares if it's a placebo...

There's no good science on this and I doubt there ever will be. Like most Chinese medicine, it's not in practitioners interest to do a proper study. The NIH said the same and called the very best studies "inconclusive". If such chafing fixes all the ailments that it's claimed to, than everything I know about how the body functions could also be wrong. IMO this is right up there with Rhino horn & Bear gallbladder as a great example of the power of placebo .