About & Method
AcuiQ indexes point selections that other people published, and lets you search them by symptom. It is a reference tool. It does not diagnose, it does not differentiate patterns, and it does not decide what to treat — those are the parts of acupuncture it deliberately leaves alone, described below.
What the database holds
5,571 entries linking symptoms to points, drawn from 6,170 catalogued points across 13,887 indexed symptom terms. Every entry is one of the kinds below, and each result card says which kind it is.
Study-reported — 3,765 entries
Point selections extracted from published papers. Each carries a DOI or article link you can open and check. This is the bulk of the database and the part worth trusting most.
Website — 332 entries
Point selections taken from acupuncture websites rather than from the literature. Linked, but not peer-reviewed and not always attributed at source. They rank below study-reported entries. A handful came from flashcard sites and are being removed.
Text and case report — 994 entries
Prescriptions recorded in clinical texts, compiled point-prescription sets, and individual case reports. Cited by name; many are Chinese-language sources indexed in CNKI without an open link.
Generated indication lists — 480 entries
Not prescriptions. Each collects every catalogued point whose textbook indications mention one symptom — up to 205 points in a single list, spanning every meridian. They exist because they are a useful revision aid, and they are labelled as generated wherever they appear. Nobody selected those points together, and no one should needle them together.
How results are ranked
Your search terms are resolved to symptom concepts, expanded over synonyms and narrower terms, and matched by text similarity against each entry’s symptom list. An entry scores by how much of your query it covers; study-reported entries outrank generated indication lists at equal coverage. That is the whole mechanism — fuzzy string matching over a curated index. There is no model, nothing is learned from your searches, and the percentage on a card is text similarity, not clinical confidence.
666 entries name a single point, because that is what their source reported. They are labelled “single-point entry” rather than “protocol”. Where no entry matches at all, the search falls back to showing points that merely list your symptom among their indications — labelled as an index lookup, with no score attached.
What this tool does not do
These are real limits, not modesty. Practitioners raised every one of them, and they are accurate.
- It does not differentiate patterns. Search “constipation” and it will not ask whether the cause is heat, qi stagnation, cold, or deficiency — which is the question that determines point selection. It matches the word, not the presentation.
- It does not ask what it would need to. Onset, duration, what makes the symptom better or worse, tongue, pulse, constitution — none of it is collected, so none of it informs a result.
- It does not explain why a point was chosen. The database records that a source paired a point with a symptom, not the reasoning. For that, use a point manual.
- It is not a diagnosis and not a treatment plan. A published protocol worked for the patients in that study, under a diagnosis that study made. Neither transfers automatically to anyone else.
Who it is for
Students and practitioners who want to see what the literature actually prescribes for a given complaint, and to get to the source quickly. It works well as a way into the literature and as a memory aid. It works badly as a substitute for differentiation, and it is not built for self-diagnosis by people without training.
Who maintains it
To be completed.
Corrections
If an entry misattributes a source, misreads a prescription, or pairs a point with a symptom its source never claimed, that is a bug and it will be fixed. Extraction method and the datasets published from it are documented under Research.