The Nuance
Should I Be Doing Gua Sha?
The traditional Chinese therapy may not be a beauty elixir, but it is promising for overall health
Every week, the Nuance will go beyond the basics, offering a deep and researched look at the latest science and expert insights on a buzzed-about health topic.
From acupuncture to aromatherapy, many forms of traditional Chinese medicine have found fans in the West. One of the newly popular practices is gua sha — also known as scraping, spooning, and coining — which is a kind of focused skin massage.
Typically, a gua sha practitioner uses a rigid, round-edged instrument to “press-stroke” one section of a person’s lubricated skin over and over again, says Arya Nielsen, a gua sha researcher and assistant clinical professor of family medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. This massaging causes tiny capillaries in the skin to leak blood, which produces some vivid but temporary birthmark-like bruises known as petechiae (which, by the way, is the medical term for a hickey).
Nielsen’s research shows the skin aggravation that results from gua sha produces a surge in surface blood circulation. As these blood cells are reabsorbed, she says, an enzyme called heme oxygenase-1 is created, and this seems to result…
