A Good Policy for Guaranteed Safe Practice of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Usage of Disposable Cupping Cups

Abstract EN

This is a comment on “Addendum: Safety Standards for Gua Sha (Press-Stroking) and Ba Guan (Cupping)” [1].

Interventions of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) are facing huge challenges whether their effectiveness and safety can be supported by concrete evidence.

Although CAM is widely used and takes considerable charge of public health worldwide, benefits and harms related to each CAM intervention are frequently disputable, which urges relevant researchers and academic societies to conduct rigorous clinical trials and to support information for medical decision with evidence-based knowledge through reputable clinical guidelines.

One of the major factors that may be inhibiting referrals of CAM treatments by biomedical doctors is the absence of appropriate information related to CAM interventions [1].

In this sense, this current safety guideline on the Gua sha (press-stroking) and Ba guan (cupping) by Nielsen et al.

deserves a passionate welcome, even though it seems to have room for improvement, especially in the field of cupping [2].