Chronic pain and muscle spasms can put a serious cramp in your lifestyle. When it hurts to get out of bed, hurts to get dressed and hurts to carry out daily activities, life becomes torture. But a wonderful Chinese technique called gua sha can scrape away that pain and actually offer enough relief to make pain medications unnecessary.

Painful Realities

Western medicine identifies scar tissue from new or old injuries, excess fibrin in the tissues, stress, lack of magnesium and other damage as the cause of muscle spasm. On the other hand, Eastern medical systems recognize a deficiency of qi (energy) as a cause for these types of problems, leading to the stagnation of blood and fluids and a painful blockage.

How do you get rid of that pain? For us, the common methods of pain relief include analgesic and anti-inflammatory medications, which reduce symptomatic pain and swelling. But these treatments have a downside: They offer relief only during the time the medication is active in the body. They do nothing to correct the structural issues in the body causing the trigger points, spasms and pain.

You can also alternate the application of ice and heat to treat muscle pain. These are safe methods for symptomatic relief, but are difficult to apply for a prolonged period. And you need to keep using these techniques if you don’t treat the root cause of the pain.

Acupuncture, chiropractic, massage and physical therapy can also be used to treat muscle pain caused by structural issues. These are all reliable and play a role in re-establishing normalcy in the body. But there is another method, less well known yet powerful, that I’d like to share. It is called gua sha or “scraping” therapy.

A Form Of Bodywork

Gua sha can be thought of as a form of bodywork. It is similar to massage, but is carried out with a blunt instrument. Also, it is only applied to one area at a time and in only one direction.

Let’s say you experience tightness or a chronic trigger point in your shoulders. When you receive gua sha, you sit, shoulders exposed to the practitioner. The practitioner’s fingers press along the line of your shoulder. If the fingers show white marks on your skin after being removed, this is considered to be a sign of blockage. The blood and fluids are not moving freely in the shoulder, and this is the cause of the pain. When the sha or white compression marks take a long time to disappear, the problem has been there for a long period of time or the trouble spot lies deep within the muscle.

After initially testing the spot, the therapists lubricates the area and uses the blunt end of an instrument (like an old coin, rounded metal bottle cap, a piece of jade or hard plastic) to scrape over the troubled area. The movement is always deep, slow and steady and in the same direction away from the spine. (In other cases, like mid-back pain, the movement is parallel to the spine, but not toward or on it). The instrument is held at about a 30-degree angle, and the motion is repeated again and again until discoloration of the skin occurs.

During this process, patients often become worried. But there’s no need for alarm. What is happening is that the repetitive motion of the instrument brings the toxic, stagnant blood and fluids to the surface of the skin where the lymphatic system can clear it. At the same time, as the old, stagnant blood is removed from the muscle, fresh blood carrying fresh oxygen and nutrients is brought into the area to aid in healing. While the skin surface looks as if it is bruised, if the technique is performed properly, there should be no pain when the area is touched. This is a case where something looks worse than it feels. Interestingly, if there is no problem in that area, no dark discoloration comes to the surface and the skin retains its normal color.

Logical Treatment

While the 1,000-year-old method of gua sha may sound peculiar, it is actually based on the same logic used today in physical therapy and sports medicine. It is a form of deep-tissue massage or myofascial release. It augments soft-tissue mobilization. The process of applying the device gently yet firmly over the spasm area acts to mildly re-injure the area to promote proper healing.

In many cases, trigger points and muscle spasms are caused by injuries that may be decades old. These injuries often shorten muscles, tendons or ligaments after healing takes place improperly. Too much connective tissue can be formed which restricts movement and blood flow. Gua sha scraping breaks through this and allows for proper re-healing of the area, thereby correcting once and for all the origin of the pain and tightness.

While scraping can be performed on most muscles of the body, it should be avoided directly over bony areas, and never on a location where there is a new injury, painful bruising, sunburn or rash, or a break in the skin. Moles and pimples must be covered by the practitioner’s fingers so they are not scraped and made painful.

The Very Idea

The very idea of scraping away pain, or causing a new micro-injury to heal an old chronic injury, and of allowing a practitioner to bring dark purple bruising to the surface of your skin may seem a little unreasonable and odd; but I’d like you to put aside your judgment of this ancient healing method and read more about it online. There are many sites and pages and images available via a simple Internet search. If you can, call an acupuncturist or other bodywork therapist and ask if they are proficient in the method. If so, give it a try. A few days of skin discoloration beats decades of pain meds and physical therapy.