When was the last time you cut yourself while cooking or got bruised during a hike? How long did it take for the wound to stop bothering you? Typically, when considering healing time, we think about the depth of the cut or which organs were affected.
However, a study published in December 2023 conducted by professor Ellen Langer from Harvard University found another significant factor that seems to influence healing speed, altering the picture we once had.
In a unique experiment, Ms. Langer and her colleagues used cupping therapy, a technique using glass cups that has been used for thousands of years in China and ancient Egypt for treating diseases, pain, and more. When the rim of the cup is applied to the human body, the vacuum “sucks” the skin into the cup, breaking the capillaries in the area and causing a blood blister that sometimes lasts for several hours, manifesting as a red mark on the skin. The researchers aimed to examine how quickly participants would recover from this controlled “injury” and allocated them 28 minutes....
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