Meret Ryhiner is lying face down in Quang Huynh’s Uptown New Orleans clinic, awaiting a blood-letting treatment for spider veins in her legs.

“I hate needles,” Ryhiner says. But she got good results from Quang’s acupuncture treatments, so she agreed to take her treatment one step further. She’s nervous about letting the healer extract blood from her body. She’s also a bit skeptical. But she’s decided to give the ancient medical practice a try.

Quang pricks her spider veins with a small blood-letting pick, forming beads of blood on her legs. And?

“It just feels like little pin pricks, like acupuncture,” Ryhiner reports. “It doesn’t hurt much at all.”

A common medical practice for more than 2,000 years, sometimes used with the help of leeches, blood-letting has largely been pushed underground since the arrival of 20^th century medicine. Most people don’t realize that the red stripe on a barber’s pole represents blood, a symbol that dates back to medieval days when barbers moonlighted as surgeons.

New Orleans is one of many cities seeing a renewal of ancient and exotic healing practices. The rising cost of health care, the growing acceptance of alternative medicine and — in New Orleans — all the hospitals and clinics that have remained padlocked since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 have helped create a booming business for Quang and other practitioners.

Along with blood-letting, New Orleans and other places are seeing an increase in the practice of “cupping,” particularly in cities with large Asian populations. In 2004, actress Gwyneth Paltrow created a stir when she walked onto the red carpet of a film premiere with a row of distinctive raised cupping welts visible above her gown.

Do these practices work? Some patients report positive results for conditions as varied as joint and muscle pain, headaches, insomnia, and sexual dysfunction. Quang insists that Ryhiner’s blood-letting was not just a cosmetic treatment. “All of these spider veins hold what (Chinese medicine) calls ‘stagnant blood,’” he explains. “We believe if any of it escapes and goes to the brain, she will have a stroke.”

The theory behind cupping is similar to blood-letting. A practice closely linked to acupuncture dating back to ancient Chinese alchemists, cupping involves using a glass cup (ancient practitioners used horns) or similar suction-producing device to raise sections of skin and superficial muscle and unblock “chi,” the body’s internal vascular energy, by promoting blood flow along specific pressure points.

Valerie Viosca, 37, is an 8th-generation New Orleanian, and about to be cupped by a Vietnamese healer, Hu, who declined to give his full name. Viosca says the practice was used in the West as well as the East, and both traditions believe that negative energy is being drawn out of the body by the forced suction.

Viosca seems calm as she arrives at a Hu’s tidy, non-descript home in the suburban New Orleans. She removes her shirt and lies face down on a treatment bed. He wheels in a tray of clear glass cups, each no more than a half an inch in diameter. He lights an alcohol-drenched cotton swab, and with a tall flame, heats the inside of a cup. Then he places the heated cup on Viosca’s back. The skin inside the cup begins to swell into a bubble.

As Hu applies more cups, Viosca’s back appears to be growing a cluster of light bulbs. Though not painful, Viosca says that cupping leaves blisters for a few days. “I feel great,” she states in mid-treatment, and drifts off into an endorphin-enhanced sleep.

Hu also places a few acupuncture needles into a few pressure points, then puts cups over each needle. After he removes the cups, Viosca awakens. “I feel dizzy and way acu-stoned!” she exclaims. “I feel the weight of the world lifted!”

Then, as if answering the observer’s question, she feels compelled to add, “This is real medicine.”

Sean David Hobbs is an avid traveler from Wisconsin who spent time in Turkey before settling in New Orleans.