Trends
"Ventosa therapy" hit 33,100 monthly searches in June 2026, up 29,991% year over year. On its own, that number looks like a clean breakout, and most trend coverage would write it that way.
Our data says something more interesting, and more useful. This is the second time this exact term has spiked. It did the same thing in March and April 2025, reaching 49,500 monthly searches, and then fell all the way back to 110 within a single month and stayed there for fourteen months. Meanwhile the English-language term for the identical treatment, "cupping therapy," has barely moved in two years and is currently declining.
That combination, a repeat-spiking Spanish-language term alongside a flat English one, tells you something no single-language keyword tool will: the growth in this category is not coming from where the industry has been looking. Here is the full picture.
Key takeaways:
- "Ventosa therapy" reached 33,100 monthly searches in June 2026, up 29,991% year over year and 36,678% over three months (Rising Trends data).
- This is its second spike, not its first. The term hit 49,500 searches in March and April 2025, then collapsed to 110 the following month and flatlined for fourteen months.
- The English term is flat. "Cupping therapy" has held between 60,500 and 90,500 searches every month for two years and is currently down 18% year over year. The category is not growing in English.
- "Ventosa" is Spanish for suction cup. The practice is embedded in Filipino traditional medicine as ventosa or bintusa and in Latino healing traditions alongside sobada, meaning this demand has a cultural base, not just a fitness-trend one.
- The evidence is weak and getting weaker. A 2025 systematic review in JOSPT Open comparing dry cupping to placebo found effects on pain "very uncertain at all timepoints" and recommended higher-certainty treatments first.
What we're seeing in the Rising Trends data
Here is the full search history for "ventosa therapy" against "cupping therapy," the English term for the same practice.
Two words, one treatment: "ventosa therapy" vs "cupping therapy"
US monthly search volume, Jan 2025 to Jun 2026 · Source: Rising Trends database
Three observations, in order of importance.
The 2025 spike round-tripped completely. March and April 2025 both registered 49,500 searches. May 2025 registered 110. That is not a decay curve, it is a cliff, and the term then sat at baseline for fourteen consecutive months. Whatever drove that spike, it converted zero durable interest.
The 2026 spike is smaller so far. June 2026's 33,100 is about two thirds of the 2025 peak. Our system classifies the trajectory as RISING and the pace as EXPONENTIAL, but with one month of data on the new leg, the honest read is that it is too early to know whether this is a repeat of the same short-lived pattern or a real second wave. We are flagging it rather than declaring a breakout, because the 2025 precedent is the single most relevant fact about this curve.
The English term did not participate in either spike. "Cupping therapy" ran between 60,500 and 90,500 searches per month across the entire window, including through both ventosa spikes, and is currently down 18% year over year at 60,500. If cupping as a category were genuinely surging, the term with five times the base volume would show it. It does not.
What ventosa therapy actually is
Ventosa is cupping. A practitioner places cups on the skin and creates suction, either with heat or a manual pump, drawing tissue upward and increasing local blood flow. Sessions typically last a few minutes per placement and leave the circular marks that made the practice famous when Olympic swimmers turned up covered in them.
The reason the word matters is the reason the trend is interesting. "Ventosa" is the Spanish word for suction cup, and it carries the practice into two large communities that English-language keyword research renders invisible. In the Philippines, the practice is known as ventosa or bintusa, a borrowing from Spanish that arrived during the colonial period, and it remains a widely practiced traditional healing modality, commonly offered as an add-on to full-body massage in local wellness businesses. In Latino communities, ventosas appear alongside related traditional practices such as sobada, a therapeutic kneading massage.
So the person searching "ventosa therapy" is often not the person searching "cupping therapy." The English searcher is usually a fitness or recovery consumer who saw it on an athlete. The ventosa searcher is more likely looking for a practice they already know culturally, and searching for a provider near them.
Why a repeat-spiking term is worth more attention, not less
It would be easy to dismiss this trend on the round-trip. That would be a mistake, and the reason is instructive for anyone doing this kind of research.
A term that spikes, dies completely, and spikes again on the same magnitude is behaving differently from both a fad and a breakout. A fad spikes once and decays gradually. A real breakout spikes and holds a materially higher floor, the way tai chi walking did when it went from 210 to a sustained plateau above 246,000. Ventosa did neither: it went to 49,500 and back to 110, exactly.
Here are the three signatures side by side, which is the single most useful framework we use when reading a new trend.
Three curve signatures, and what each one tells you to do
Illustrative shapes drawn from real Rising Trends curves · Source: Rising Trends
That signature usually means the demand is event-driven rather than interest-driven. Something external, a viral video, a celebrity appearance, a piece of broadcast media, a holiday period, pushed a large number of people to look the term up once, and none of them came back. The underlying practice has a stable, culturally embedded user base, and that base does not need to search for it.
For an operator, this distinction is the whole ballgame. A durable breakout justifies building a content program or a product line. A repeat spiker justifies something much cheaper: a page that already exists and is ready to catch the next spike, which our data suggests arrives roughly annually. The failure mode is treating the second one as proof of a boom and over-investing on the strength of one month.
What the evidence actually says
Cupping has a large research literature and a genuinely weak evidence base, and the gap between those two facts is where most wellness coverage goes wrong.
The most direct test is placebo-controlled. A 2025 systematic review with meta-analysis in JOSPT Open examined dry cupping against placebo cupping for musculoskeletal complaints and concluded that effects on pain were very uncertain at all timepoints, recommending that treatment alternatives with higher-certainty evidence be used first. That is close to the strongest statement the evidence supports.
Broader reviews are slightly warmer but narrow. A 2025 meta-analysis on chronic musculoskeletal pain found cupping may reduce pain intensity with immediate effects, while explicitly finding that functional disability and mental health outcomes were not improved. Reviews focused on low back pain repeatedly cite the same limitation: the absence of a standard protocol and of high-quality randomized trials leaves the evidence poor and controversial.
Read together, the honest summary is: cupping appears able to produce a short-term reduction in perceived pain intensity, that effect is hard to separate from placebo, and it does not appear to improve function. It is generally low-risk when performed by a competent practitioner on intact skin, with the main documented harms being the expected bruising, occasional burns from fire cupping, and rare skin infections. The meaningful risk is substitution, meaning someone delaying assessment for a condition that needs actual diagnosis.
None of that makes the demand illegitimate. It does mean anyone building a business on this term should market it as a relaxation and short-term comfort service, which is defensible, rather than as a treatment for a medical condition, which is not.
The opportunity hiding in the language gap
The most commercially useful finding here has nothing to do with cupping specifically.
Multicultural search demand is systematically under-served because it is systematically under-measured. The standard workflow, brainstorm English keywords, check English volumes, build English pages, is structurally blind to a term like ventosa. It generated 49,500 searches in a month and almost nobody in the wellness industry noticed, because it does not appear in an English keyword list at all.
The same logic applies well beyond this one word. Any practice with a Spanish, Tagalog, Mandarin, Vietnamese, or Arabic name in common US use is likely carrying search volume that never shows up in conventional research. The competitive dynamics are favorable in a way English wellness keywords have not been for a decade: for a local clinic, a Spanish-language page for ventosa is dramatically easier to rank than an English page for cupping, and the searcher behind it usually has higher intent, because they are looking for a provider rather than an explanation.
This connects to the broader pattern we keep finding across the wellness category. As we documented in the tai chi walking breakout and the cortisol meter surge, the calm-and-recovery audience is large, durable, and constantly rotating between vehicles. Ventosa is that same demand expressed in a different language, with a much longer cultural history behind it.
Where this is heading
Three calls, held loosely given we have one month of the new leg.
Watch July and August before committing. If ventosa holds above 20,000 searches for three consecutive months, it has broken its own pattern and is a genuine second wave. If it drops under 1,000 by August, it repeated 2025 exactly. Our data will answer this by autumn, and the 2025 precedent means the burden of proof is on the trend.
The English term stays flat regardless. "Cupping therapy" has been remarkably stable for two years across both spikes. There is no evidence of a category-wide surge, and anyone reading the ventosa number as "cupping is booming" is misreading it.
The language gap widens before it closes. US Spanish-language search volume keeps growing while most wellness content operations remain English-only. Terms like ventosa will keep producing these apparently-invisible spikes until content strategy catches up with the audience, and the operators who build for it early will own those results cheaply.
The broader lesson is the one worth keeping. A 29,991% growth number is not a finding by itself. The finding is what the curve did the last time, and whether the same demand shows up under a different name. In this case the answer to both questions is what makes the trend worth understanding.
Want to see the full history behind numbers like these, including the spikes that round-tripped? Read our guide on how to identify market trends, explore the live ventosa therapy trend page, or browse what is breaking out right now on the Rising Trends dashboard.
