Football player tweets photo of his blood-sucking cup therapy

Image: Twitter

When we think of detoxing, the first thing that comes to mind is probably two days in a lemon-flavoured, watery juice binge, but rugby union star Sonny Bill Williams does it a little differently.

Posting a photo to Twitter on Wednesday, Williams may have looked like he was auditioning for a reboot of the Saw franchise, but he was really undergoing "hijama therapy," a form of wet cupping that releases blood from the body.

Hijama — meaning "sucking" in Arabic — is a form of traditional medicine which puts negative pressure on a cupped spot on the body. Small cuts are made to the spots on the body and blood is drawn out in the process.

The practice is said to promote tissue repair, but Dr Brad McKay — an Australian doctor and host of Embarrassing Bodies Down Under — replied to him and said it might not work the way Williams wants it to.

McKay spoke to Mashable Australia and said there's almost no benefit to doing this apart from religious reasons (hijama is used widely in Islam, which is Williams' religion).

"What you're seeing in the picture is basically leaking blood from cupping a swollen area of skin," he said.

"The whole theory about the cupping technique is that it's releasing toxins, releasing bad blood from your body ... but basically it's just causing you to get a bruise underneath your skin. There's no therapeutic benefit at all."

McKay said a number of his patients have treated themselves with cupping for a number of ailments, from back pain to pneumonia, and that this has made him concerned.

"Even if you're just using the normal cupping technique, it can rub up against the skin and cause a significant abrasion, permanent scarring and can even cause infections if you're breaking down the skin barrier."

Jennifer Jones, a traditional Chinese medical practitioner, spoke to Mashable Australia and said while Williams was probably only seeking a detox effect from the cupping, there are a few more uses than you may think. One of the main reasons for using bloodletting techniques is to release blood clots.

"From a Chinese medicine perspective, in my field, we use wet cupping for people with high blood pressure so that we can drop the pressure in the body," she said, "and that's something that's measurable with a blood pressure machine.

"If someone's also had an injury and there's been a lot of internal bleeding, sometime the body doesn't really clear up a lot of it of its own accord. There might be damaged tissues, clotted blood that stay in the body. When using the bloodletting technique, I've physically seen those clots be drawn out of the body."

While probably not what Williams was going for, the detox effect that he was hoping to gain from doing this is also highly sought-after with women trying to conceive, and Jones said in her experience it can increase fertility.

Fans congratulated him anyway, and a few others just weren't really sure what was going on in general.