Like a lot of second-generation Ashkenazi parents, mine used Yiddish as a secret language when they didn’t want the kinder to know what they were talking about.
That’s why I managed to learn exactly one Yiddish phrase from my father: Es vet helfn vi a toytn bankes (עס וועט העלפן ווי × ×˜×•×™×˜×Ÿ ב×× ×§×¢×¡) — that is, “It will help like cupping a corpse.”
Obscure? Sure. But all you need to know is that “bankes” (rhymes with “swan kiss”) is a folk remedy involving little glass cups that are heated and then applied to the skin, forming a vacuum that healers believed would suck out bad spirits, malevolent “humours” and whatever else was making you sick in the pre-antibiotics era.
So imagine my surprise when I learned that the hottest new therapy for Olympic athletes is — bankes! Those purple circles covering the shoulders and backs of swimmer Michael Phelps and other athletes? Those are bruises from cupping therapy, in which trainers apply the heated glass cups to loosen and stimulate muscles.
“I’ve done it before meets, pretty much every meet I go to,” Phelps told the New York Times on Aug. 8.
According to one study of the cupping technique, athletes more quickly recovered their creatine kinase levels (which is good), experienced milder fatigue and even enjoyed “better interpersonal relations” than those who were not cupped.
An Israeli academic who reviewed the research suggests the treatment works by stimulating the immune system. But he didn’t rule out the placebo effect. In other words, it works if you think it does.