Traditional bleeding technique gaining popularity in Yemen

Small incisions are through which "bad blood" is drained from the body.

The number of people turning to a traditional blood drawing technique called hejaama is increasing in Yemen as many find that modern medicine does not cure certain ailments.

In most Arab countries and especially in Yemen, there has been a long history of parallel medical systems for thousands of years. Research shows that hejaama, an Arabic term for a technique known in the west as “cupping,” has been used to treat various ailments in Yemen since pre-Islamic times. 

Hejaama involves burning a small piece of paper  under glass cups placed on specific parts of the patient’s body.  The small flame burns away the oxygen under the cup, creating suction on the patient’s skin.  The hejaama practitioner removes the cups and, using a sterile razor, makes four to eight small incisions into the flesh where the cups were.  The cups are placed back on the back and the paper is burnt again to create suction.  Thus, blood is sucked out of the back into the cups through the incisions. 

Hejaama is used to treat of a broad range of conditions from blood diseases such as hemophilia to hypertension, rheumatic conditions such as arthritis and sciatica, back pain, migraines, anxiety and general physical and mental illness.

Mohammed al-Udaini, who has been practicing the hejaama technique in Sana’a for four years, receives many people who come to him for help. “Every morning, I receive between 10 to 15 patients, of which around 75 percent are men and 25 percent women,” he said. 

“Any difficult disease can be treated by using hejaama,” al-Udaini said. “Nowadays, people tend to prefer hejaama to modern drugs because they find that such drugs become ineffective in treating their diseases,” said al-Udaini. “They did not find a cure for their diseases in hospitals, so they left those drugs and those hospitals and turned to alternative and religious healing,” he said. 

When a new patient arrives seeking hejaama, the practitioner asks about the nature of the illness by inquiring about the location of the pain, the length of time that the patient has been suffering, the medical history, and any other relevant information. After an initial interview, the practitioner decides if the procedure will help the patient and, and then determines what part of the body to apply hejaama.

The amount of time the hejaama operation takes depends on the amount of “bad blood” the practitioner believes the patient has. “I spent about 30 to 45 minutes in getting rid of all the bad blood from the patient’s body. The time differs from one case to another depending on the disease that he or she suffering from,” said al-Udaini. A sign of the development of the practice is that increasingly, practitioners are using modern hygienic medical implements, rather than traditional ones made of bull’s horn, for example.

“Cupping” is a traditional medical practice used in Yemen and other countries to cleanse the body of “bad blood.”

The research paper entitled Cupping or Hejaama: A medical procedure in use by Yemenis to treat various ailments, was written by Junko Date, a student at the graduate school of medicine at Yamaguchi University in Japan. The research conducted from August 2000 to February 2001 included interviews conducted with more than 70 hejaama patients at the places where they were treated as well as interviews with hejaama practitioners.

The research concluded that like many other traditional societies, Yemenis believe that “bad blood” is accumulated in a specific part of the body and that it causes pain and illness if it is not somehow extracted. Hejaama is thought to be effective in relieving pain because it removes this “bad blood” from the body. Additionally, the research concluded that hejaama is recognized as a specific treatment for people with chronic pain, and not an all-purpose treatment.

The research also found that patients themselves choose hejaama over various alternative medical procedures, both modern and traditional. Hejaama is understood as a religious activity in Yemen, even though the practice may not be exactly Islamic in origin. This idea might be based on passages in the Hadith (a narrative record of the sayings and customs of the Prophet Muhammad), which say that the Prophet often performed cupping procedures. 
“I was suffering from a chronic headache,” said Fatima al-Hamdani, 55.  “I visited a lot of doctors but none of them could give me an effective medicine for this headache. Then, I decided to try hejaama, which made me feel much better.” 

Khadija Ahmed, 60, also feels better after hejaama sessions. She came to the clinic for the second time to get rid of what she considers to be “bad blood” that has accumulated in her body. She thought that the bad blood built up in her body after menopause. 

According to the Japanese research, both the practitioner and the patient believe that long-term pain in a specific part of the body is caused by blood problems and they believe that hejaama relieves that persistent pain. 

“Doctors hate those of us who work with hejaama, because they realize that a lot of patients abandon them and their medicines and come to our clinics to be treated by traditional procedures,” said al-Udaini. “But we pay no attention to what they say because we are interested in treating patients and we know that hejaama is a very important cure for many difficult and chronic diseases.”

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