17. Points and point categories

Medi-Chi uses WHO Standard Acupuncture Point Locations throughout, so LU7 is LU7 wherever you trained. Location is by proportional measurement plus palpation: the cùn is defined on the patient's own body, and the final centimetre is found by feel — a genuine point usually announces itself as a depression, a change in tissue tone, or tenderness.

You can build most prescriptions from a handful of categories, each with a characteristic clinical use.

• ·Five shū — jǐng for mental agitation and acute reversal, yíng for heat, shū for heaviness and joint pain, jīng for cough and voice, hé for the Fǔ and for diarrhoea.
• ·Yuán — tonify or regulate the organ; the first choice in deficiency.
• ·Luò — chronic and emotional patterns, and the paired channel.
• ·Xì-cleft — acute pain and, on the Yīn channels, bleeding.
• ·Bèi shū and Mù — direct organ treatment; palpate both, treat the tender one.
• ·Influential points — the eight huì for bone, marrow, sinew, vessel, Qì, Blood, Zàng and Fǔ.
• ·Confluent points of the eight extras — SP4/PC6, SI3/BL62, GB41/TE5, LU7/KI6.

Extra points sit outside the fourteen channels — Yìn Táng, Tài Yáng, Sì Shén Cōng, Zǐ Gōng, Huá Tuó Jiā Jǐ, and the rest. Ā shì points are simply where it hurts, and the Líng Shū's instruction to needle where the tenderness is has never been superseded.