What is Cupping and How Can It Support Fertility?

Chinese Medicine Cupping

What is Cupping?

Cupping is a traditional medicine practice from Ancient Chinese, Egyptian and Middle Eastern cultures.

Well known in Arabic culture as hijama, many women undertake this for fertility support.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is the type of alternative medicine I am trained in, we practise dry cupping.

This involves placing suction cups or heated cups on the body to draw out toxins and stagnation, either of blood or Qi (energy blockages).

Hijama is similar, although this practice involves small cuts to the skin to draw out blockages of blood and toxins. In Chinese Medicine we don’t cut the skin.

Cupping helps to bring nourished blood and Qi (vital energy) to the area of the body to boost healing.

How Can Cupping Help With Fertility?

To treat fertility, the cups are placed on the lower abdomen to clear Qi stagnation and blood stasis and nourish the reproductive organs. We often do this in the follicular stage of the cycle.

Fire cupping or cupping using a flame to produce the suction on the abdomen helps to warm the uterus.

In conjunction with fertility acupuncture, cupping can optimise your fertility outcome.

Cupping also helps to reduce pain, boost the immune system and help with headaches.

What Are the Side Effects of Cupping?

Although cupping is a relaxing treatment, it can cause bruising marks that are quite distinctive because they appear in circular shapes.

The colour of the cupping marks can be used for diagnostic purposes. This helps us to understand the severity of blood stasis or Qi stagnation.

• Dark / purple = blood stasis

• Bright red = heat

• Light red, disappears quickly = blood deficiency

The darker the colour, the more blockages in the fertility organs. Bruises can disappear almost immediately or they can last for a few days up to 2 weeks. For example, if you usually bruise from IVF injections, you are likely to bruise from cupping.

What Fertility Conditions Can Cupping Help With?

• PCOS / Insulin resistance

• Endometriosis

• Fibroids, polyps or cysts

• Recurrent miscarriage or recurrent implantation failure based on reproductive immunology such as:

• Elevated NK cells

• Sticky bloods (APS antiphospholipid syndrome)

This is because all of these conditions have a Blood Stasis or Qi stagnation component in Chinese Medicine. Through cupping, we are moving the 'bad blood' and Qi and eliminating toxins that contribute to these diagnoses.

I will soon be offering acupuncture package options which will include cupping at Creation Acupuncture.

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