Gua Sha

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Patient after treatment

Gua Sha (刮痧), is made up of Gua (刮, "scrape") and Sha (痧, "acute illness" such as sunstroke or cholera). Gua Sha is a folk medicine treatment that is also often used by practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine . In East Asia and Southeast Asia , Gua Sha is widely used as a healing method of folk medicine under various names . With this method, the rounded edge of a porcelain spoon, coin or the like is used. Scraped over an area of ​​the skin several times until there is noticeable discoloration and bleeding under the skin.

Gua Sha corresponds to cạo gió in Vietnamese . This means "wind scraping" and is a very often used remedy among Vietnamese against colds and fever, whereby the disease is often called trúng gió ("catching the wind").

Gua Sha is also widely used in Indonesia as a traditional Javanese folk medicine technique and is known as kerikan (literally " scraping technique") or kerok , which is understood by most Indonesians as " getting the wind out by scraping".

Any effectiveness of the process has not been scientifically proven.

The Gua Sha folk healing method

Gua Sha is a method of folk medicine, the name of this technique being in the respective language:

  • Gua Sha is very widely used in the people of the Far East as a first aid against illness.
  • Gua Sha does not require complex medical diagnosis .
  • Gua Sha is easy to use.

Nevertheless, gua sha is also used by practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine as an equally important component as cupping , although gua sha and cupping are usually not used together. This makes Gua Sha the domestic prelude to traditional Chinese treatment when scraping alone should not be enough for recovery.

The gua-sha technique

Gua Sha consists of repeated scraping on oiled skin with a rounded edge. Commonly used is a Chinese porcelain soup spoon, a worn coin, rounded animal horns, or jade. The rounded edge is pressed onto the oiled skin and moved along the muscles or meridians in approx. 10 to 15 cm long pulls. This procedure causes increased blood flow ( Sha ) in the skin, which also causes petechiae and ecchymoses . It usually takes 2 to 4 days for these to go away. The stronger the "blood stasis" (in the sense of Chinese medicine), the more the skin discolored. Typically, patients immediately feel relief and change.

The discoloration of the skin caused by Gua Sha can easily be mistaken for a sign of physical abuse.

There is a related technique, ba sha (拔 痧), or tsien sha (literally "lifting for cholera"), which is said to have an effect similar to Gua Sha. In ba sha , one lifts the skin and then moves it between the fingers until petechiae form. This technique is more likely than Gua Sha performed over tendons and ligaments or on the eyebrows.

Indications

In classical Chinese usage, Gua Sha is mostly used for:

Contraindications

Gua Sha must not be used in:

See also

The film Gua Sha - The Treatment thematizes the lack of understanding that this Far Eastern treatment method is often encountered in the West.

literature

  • A. Nielsen: Gua Sha - A traditional technique for modern medicine . Verlag für Holistic Medicine, May 2000, ISBN 978-3-927344-51-8 .
  • A. Nielsen: Gua Sha. Step-by-Step: A Visual Guide to a Traditional Technique for Modern Medicine . Instructional video. Verlag für Holistic Medicine, Koetzing 2002, ISBN 3-927344-63-X .
  • Franz Thews: Gua Sha Fa scraping method in TCM . Self-published, May 2004, ISBN 978-3-936456-07-3 .
  • P. Huard, M. Wong: Oriental Methods of Mental and Physical Fitness: The Complete Book of Meditation, Kinesitherapy, and Martial Arts in China, India, and Japan . Translated by DN Smith. Funk & Wagnalls, New York 1977, ISBN 0-308-10271-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ GW Yeatman, VV Dang: Cao Gío (coin rubbing). Vietnamese attitudes toward health care . In: JAMA . 244, December 19, 1980, pp. 2748-2749, PMID 7441861 .
  2. ^ A. Nielsen: Gua Sha: Traditional Technique for Modern Practice . Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh / New York 1995, ISBN 0-443-05181-X .
  3. ↑ BB Randall: Fatal hypokalemic thyrotoxic periodic paralysis presenting as the sudden, unexplained death of a Cambodian refugee . In: American Journal of Forensic Medical Pathology . Volume 13, September 1992, pp. 204-206, PMID 1476122 .
  4. ↑ BS Hulewicz: Coin-rubbing injuries . In: American Journal of Forensic Medical Pathology . Vol. 15, September 1994, pp. 57-60, PMID 7825559 .
  5. ↑ AL Ries, MA Picchi, LH Nguyen, RJ MoserJ, CA Molgaard, SI Wasserman: Asthma in a Vietnamese refugee population . In: American Journal of Respir Crit Care Med . Volume 155, June 1997, pp. 1895-1901, PMID 9196092 .
  6. ↑ A. Nielsen, NT Knoblauch, GJ Dobos, A. Michalsen, TJ Kaptchuk: The effect of Gua Sha treatment on the microcirculation of surface tissue: a pilot study in healthy subjects . In: Explore . Volume 3, New York 2007, pp. 456-466, PMID 17905355 .
  7. ^ ME Schwickert, FJ Saha, M. Braun, GJ Dobos: Gua Sha for migraine in inpatient withdrawal therapy of headache due to medication overuse . In: Research Complement Medicine . Volume 14, October 2007, pp. 297-300. PMID 17971671 .
  8. ↑ Gua Sha - The treatment  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at arte@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.arte.tv