HOUSTON – You may have recently seen people rubbing Gua Sha stones across their faces on social media.
Gua Sha allegedly relieves tension and reduces puffiness and inflammation (like from sinuses). However, some people are taking it much, much farther and using the technique all over the body and leaving themselves bruised.
Nellie Reed is a busy mother of two girls; Always looking for the next best thing to look and feel healthy. Although, after Gua Sha, she says she feels good, the bruising on her back suggests otherwise!
“I’m always looking for more energy to keep up,” she said. “It looks scarier than it really is, and the benefits outweigh the, you know, slight pain or whatever you might feel.”
Licensed Acupuncturist Kiat Chong in Bellaire demonstrated for KPRC 2 how he uses the technique called “scraping” to move in a downward motion on muscles. The idea is this technique causes blood vessels near the surface of the skin, called capillaries to burst, and according to Chong, it’s healing for people who suffer from chronic pain.
“We do controlled damage to the body... once you have that, you will start to repair it,” Chong explained. “When there’s a trauma, the blood will rush to and try to repair.”
Gua ha is one of the oldest forms of Chinese medicine, which has been around for thousands of years.
“What the patient would expect is that the muscle used to be so tired, heavy, but once we scrape it... Now blood flow, the muscle become loose, and you actually feel lighter,” Chong said.
While this technique is popular on the face, Chong says you never push hard enough to cause bruising on the face. Instead, it requires a lighter touch and can be done more often, like 2-3 times a week. The body is far less frequent.
“It’s always more of a long-term solution rather than a short-term solution,” Chong said. “Short term, you feel the pain. Long term you feel the relief.”
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Reed said it’s helped her get a range of motion she didn’t even realize she was missing.
“I rave about it because it’s different and it also works and so I tell my friends, my coworkers, my family all about it,” Reed said.
American doctors consider this as a holistic treatment. You find acupuncturists practice this, maybe even some physical therapists may use techniques similar to Gua Sha. There’s literature published by the National Institutes of Health that says this can be a beneficial treatment for some people.
