Cupping

[orthent]

I'm thinking of having a character get cupped for bronchitis. Google has provided plenty of information about how it's done (including some scary-looking photographs of the marks), but is there anyone here who has had cupping done for chest trouble who could tell me some particulars about how it actually feels--especially how and whether it

Comments

[imrihamun]

I'm just going to warn you, I don't feel like explaining how acupuncture works right now...but the internet can explain it pretty well.

He did it first, before my standard acupuncture treatment...well, my modified treatment, since I usually go for headaches/insomnia and this time was to kick the damn cold out, since they have a tendency to linger in my chest since I had bronchitis in high school. Since his school of acupuncture has me laying face-down most of the time with needles on my back, he thought it was better for me to cough all the crap out before he put them in.

So he took my pulses (my meridian pulses, not my Western pulses, as I mentally separate them), gave me a needle in my eyebrow area to clear my sinuses, and then decided to do the cupping. I laid down, did the cupping for maybe 15 minutes or so, coughed up a bunch of crap, and then got up and he tried some of my aural points. This gave me some weird side-effects - I got really nervous for no good reason, so we quit. I laid down again, got some needles in my back, sat there for about half an hour with the heat lamp on my back (it was winter), and then got up and coughed some more crap up.

As some others have said, though, chest percussion and laying face down is a good way to get congestion out anyway. The negative pressure cups create, over twenty minutes, may work in a similar way and has the advantage of allowing a practitioner to not actually do the hard work with his own hands for twenty minutes.

[orthent]

I'm sorry for not having got back to thank you for so long--it's good to have this extra info, since making medicine in this 'verse just like early-modern Western medicine seems boring. I'll be looking up acupuncture and Chinese traditional medicine, for sure; on the other hand, I think there will also have to be some apparent woo-woo, just for kicks, and the story will never really make clear whether it's medicine, magic, or a placebo effect making it work. There is quite a bit of actual magic in this 'verse, too, but the wizards don't have the real answers to everything--there's experimental magic going on, and even some quackery into the bargain.