How To Perform Gua Sha

So, what we're going to do is we're going to do gua sha on a patient. So, in this case, we're going to work on the whole back. We're going to use, for our gua sha tool, this piece of buffalo horn which has a nice smooth round edge and I'm going to use a Chinese liniment which is emulsified cream which has herbal preparations inside.

You can use olive oil, you can use any kind of vitamin E cream and for a tool, you could use smooth round objects that aren't going to be scrapy. So first of all, we're going to apply the liniments which can be a bit cold and we're going to use the tool to work down the back. So, we're going to cover the trace of the spinal muscles, the muscles next to the spine.

As you can see, this area's starting to turn red already and we're just going to continue working this area and it's going to show us where we need to concentrate. As you can see in this area, the sha has started to come up. So, this is an area we're going to focus on and it's starting to get a little tender in this area so we can lighten up a bit and maybe move and follow this area and see whether it's coming this way or coming this way.

So, we're going to try and see we can bring up more sha coming away from the midline. Generally with gua sha, you want to move down from the body and away from the midline to the direction where you want to travel. But again, the more developed you are with gua sha, the more you can use it in different situations according to the diagnosis that you worked with.

Alright, in this area, we can see there's a line coming down next to the shoulder blade, a redness coming in to where this stagnation is, and if we feel this area, we could feel this very fibrous tissue through here. So, we can see there's not much blood flow coming through this area. So, let's work on the other side and see whether this is a symmetrical pattern, whether it affects both sides of the body.

So, we already know this is an area that you might want to start and concentrate on the area, and already we can feel that this area already has fibrous tissue. I could feel through the tool that I'm using. So I would expect there to be sha coming up.

So, we have a little bit of redness coming through but not much sha. Even though this fibrous tissue here, so I'm going to check the tissue on both sides, if anything's a little tighter here, so this is going to encourage me to continue working. On this one, I'm just going to work across here.

This is a bit stronger now. So, very often, these areas are guarded. So personally, if you're ticklish and may feel the need to laugh, they may feel a very intense situation there.

So if that gets a bit too much, what we can do is we can just use a bit of percussive technique to break up any stagnation there first of all and we're guarding. So, we can already feel that around this area, there can be a lot of tension. So, very often, we get chi stagnation and it affects the diaphragm very much and this would be an area you would want to work to loosen up.

So, it doesn't look like too much sha is going to come up on this side because there is more stagnation on this side. Whereas here, we have the sha that's come up and so this has a fibrous muscle tissue, just over this local area that needs to be released. And if I continue going down, expected to be less sha coming up on the lower back, a little bit of redness is starting to come up quickly here.

Do you get lower backaches? (Yeah) So, for someone who gets lower backaches, you can already see that just this area here is turning read and just that spot there. Is that the spot where you normally get pain? (The whole area) Okay, we can already see that the gua sha is telling us where this pain is and then we can go in other forms of treatment to work manually or we continue just with the gua sha itself. So here, we might want to use a second technique where we press in and flick.

And we can do the same in these areas an