Leave the Cupping to Your Tailor

I went past an alternative medicine place the other day.  It offered a range of what, for want of a better word, I will call treatments.  One thing being offered was cupping.  I can't help thinking at this point that "alternative medicine" would be better described as "an alternative to medicine".  I also have to wonder if people who embrace alternative medicine would similarly embrace alternatives to other fields of study.
"Hurry up with my cupping, I'm due at my trial by ordeal in fifteen minutes."

For those of you for whom the intricacies of cupping have so far been a mystery permit me to elucidate.  Cupping, quite logically, involves the placing of glass cups on various exposed portions of one's anatomy.  With the cups in place the air pressure within them is then reduced, usually by the application of heat.  This results in, well, red circles on your skin.  I've no idea what therapeutic effects this is supposed to have and the modern medical establishment tends to agree with me but we've been doing it for thousands of years and thus it must be heaps better than any medical treatment that we've come up with in the last couple of centuries, you know since we started to know what we're doing.

Proponents of alternative to medicine claim that mainstream medicine (commonly known as "medicine") is biased against traditional methods and I'm sure there is some truth to that.  After all if you've studied for years to learn how to treat medical ailments you're likely to get a little irate if some witchdoctor turns up and claims to be able to achieve the same results with half a cup of bat's piss and ritual scarification.  However I suspect that the principal objection the mainstream medical community has to alternative therapies is that they like their treatments to work.  They also like to know how and why they work.

I also feel that the people who are so fond of alternative medicines have forgotten where modern medicine comes from.  Modern medicine is traditional medicine. It's just been organised logically, tested for results and where possible improved upon.  Take aspirin for instance; a thoroughly acceptable alternative to aspirin is to chew white willow bark.  White willow bark works because it contains salicylic acid which is also the active ingredient in aspirin.  All modern medicine did was identify the active ingredient, put it in a somewhat easier package and make it available to people who didn't actually have a white willow tree growing in their backyard.

An even better example is trepanning.  It just doesn't get any more traditional than this.  We have been successfully trepanning people since (quite literally) the Stone Age.  It worked then and it works now (although I don't recommend trying it at home).  Which is to say if you are suffering from something that can be alleviated by trepanning then trepanning will work.  Modern medicine has tightened up the somewhat scatter gun approach for using it (trepanning is no good against migraines for example), cleared up that ugly post operative infection rate and retitled the practitioners as neurosurgeons.  This last is probably for the peace of mind of the patient's relatives who aren't likely to be reassured if the nursing staff inform them that the witchdoctor is on his way.

Modern medicine is actually quite shameless in appropriating traditional methods.  If there is something they haven't appropriated it is very likely because it doesn't work.  Trepanning is practiced in rare and specific circumstances.  Cupping isn't practiced at all except at a dubious tailor.