Cupping guides
Thigh pain: front, back, outside and inside – what the pain can be (muscle, tendon, nerve from the back, hip, blood vessels), when to seek care, and what helps: exercises, stretching and cupping
The thigh is the body's largest muscle package and hurts for many reasons: overworked or strained muscles, irritated tendon attachments at hip and knee, nerves pinched in the back or groin radiating down the thigh, wear in the hip joint felt in the groin and the front of the thigh, and in rare cases a blood clot. Where it hurts says a lot. Here we go through the thigh part by part: the front (quadriceps, hip flexor, hip osteoarthritis, femoral nerve), the back (hamstrings, sciatica, sitting bone), the outside (iliotibial band, trochanteric bursitis, meralgia paresthetica with burning numbness), the inside (adductors, groin, varicose veins, blood clot). What points to what, when to seek care (sudden swelling and warmth in the thigh, numbness with weakness, pain after a fall in older people), what helps in each case, and how to cup the thigh: the most rewarding area on the whole body for cupping.
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Nerve pain and trapped nerves: how it feels, where nerves get compressed (neck, back, elbow, wrist, hip, knee, foot), when it's urgent, what helps and how cupping is used around a trapped nerve
Nerve pain feels different from muscle and joint pain: burning, electric, stabbing, radiating along a path, with numbness, pins and needles or weakness, often worse at night and independent of how you load. The most common cause is a nerve being compressed or irritated at one of the body's narrow passages: the nerve roots of the neck, the lower back (sciatica), the elbow (ulnar), the wrist (carpal tunnel), the hip and buttock (piriformis, meralgia paraesthetica), the outside of the knee (peroneal) and the foot (tarsal tunnel, Morton's neuroma). Here is how to recognise nerve pain, a map of where nerves get compressed and what it is called, the warning signs, what helps (giving the nerve room, nerve gliding, movement, posture, sometimes medication), what doesn't help, and how cupping is used on the muscles around the nerve, never on the nerve itself or a numb area.
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