Background and Purpose: Cupping therapy is one of the traditional folk medicine in many countries that is used in patents to restore balance to their bodies. Today the use of this treatment significantly increased but considerable effort to explain the mechanism of the effect of this treatment and presented in relation to it, has not been. To investigate the theories about the mechanism of the therapeutic effects of cupping that discussed above in the world this review was designed

Methods and Materials: In this review article, two systems, "Google scholar" and "PubMed" was used for the search. Keywords "Al-hijamah / Cupping", "mechanism of action", "theory" and "hypothesis " individually and in combination, in Persian and English from 1998 to 2015 were searched.

Results: Among the mechanisms and theories have been proposed, five theories, namely the theory of Greek medicine, Chinese medicine theory of energy, Pain theory, Auto hemolytic and Homeostasis theory and Taibah theory that had more scientific evidence to confirm Were chosen and provide more complete description reasons for rejection or approval there.

Conclusion: The scientific evidence presented by providers theories, showed that Taibah theory has stronger scientific evidence and perhaps in the future after further investigation it can be used as the primary mechanism of the effect of cupping therapy.