A Good Policy for Guaranteed Safe Practice of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Usage of Disposable Cupping Cups

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This is a comment on " Addendum: Safety Standards for Gua Sha (Press-Stroking) and Ba Guan (Cupping) " [1]. Interventions of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) are facing huge challenges whether their effectiveness and safety can be supported by concrete evidence. Although CAM is widely used and takes considerable charge of public health worldwide, benefits and harms related to each CAM intervention are frequently disputable, which urges relevant researchers and academic societies to conduct rigorous clinical trials and to support information for medical decision with evidence-based knowledge through reputable clinical guidelines. One of the major factors that may be inhibiting referrals of CAM treatments by biomedical doctors is the absence of appropriate information related to CAM interventions [1]. In this sense, this current safety guideline on the Gua sha (press-stroking) and Ba guan (cupping) by Nielsen et al. deserves a passionate welcome, even though it seems to have room for improvement, especially in the field of cupping [2]. Compromising with reality inevitably, recently published addendum of this guideline added a process for disinfection or sterilization of cupping devices, which might retract clinical importance of this guideline [3]. Although recommended sterilization process might be effective in preventing most unnecessary adverse events related to wet-cupping, it seems quite clear that all the blood-borne viral infection cannot be blocked perfectly with it. Single use of cupping device is the best way we need to pursue, and it is not an impossible measure practically. In this letter, we want to show a good example of dissemination of single-use, disposable cupping cup through the government policy in Korea. Korean National Health Insurance Service has reimbursed the material costs of single-use, disposable cupping cups for wet-cupping treated by doctors of Korean Medicine (KM) abiding by the decision of National Health Insurance Policy Deliberative Committee, Ministry of Health & Welfare Since 2012. Presently, there are seven companies producing disposable cups after obtaining approval from the ministry (Table 1). Any licensed doctors of KM who use these products for wet-cupping can get reimbursement from the service after easy registration in the website of Korean Health Insurance Review & Assessment Service our experience of clinical practice and trials, these single-use cups can be utilized very safely and any specific …