Cupping for plantar fasciitis.

It’s such a shame. After that olympian guy strutted out with cupping bruises over his body, many people wondered and hoped that cupping could be the new secret cure for injury and pain.

As you may know, I offer a free ebook on Plantar fasciitis and I sell ( yes, I’m a commercial chap) a £27 online course that fixes plantar fasciitis.

You may wonder, why I don’t include cupping in my course. A cheap set of cups is only £30 ish  and, its fun to stick them on. There is how ever, little science that actually underpins their use.

I accept that sometimes your skin can become super tight and thus act like an ill fitting suit of armour to limit your range of motion. I totally get that it creates micro damage in the muscle which promotes better recovery, but , with  Equinus  being the major underpinning cause, ( see it as poor ankle range of motion especially the lack of the ability to dorsiflex) compounded by  muscle adhesions as mapped by Travell and Simons, ( and the need for M.E.Ts and specific strengthening)   it’s difficult to see how this treatment could effectively work. As such, in the absence of clear evidence, I’ve not included this technique in my  course, but it could work for you, so here it is.

The current science is this journal article.

Dry cupping  for plantar fasciitis: a randomized controlled trial accessed here

As with lots of reports, it’s actually hard to workout where they put the cups.  They do however conclude “Dry cupping therapy is believed to decrease pain by using the local negative pressure to promoting blood flow while electrical stimulation therapy by stimulating large-fiber sensory neurons and decreasing nociceptive inputs to central nervous system through the mechanisms of the gate control theory” If the authors are correct and they think that any pain relief is “just” a matter of Pain Gate Control theory, they are really not doing anything to fix the underpinning issue.