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, and they are set out in what AcuiQ does not do.
How AcuiQ is built
What the index holds, where each entry came from, and how a search is ranked.
5,868 entries linking symptoms to points, drawn from 773 catalogued points across 14,240 indexed symptom terms. Every entry is one of the kinds below, and each result card says which kind it is.
| Kind | Entries | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Study-reported | 4,440 | 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. |
| Text or case report | 1,094 | 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. |
| Website | 332 | Point selections taken from acupuncture websites rather than from the literature. Linked, but not peer-reviewed and not always attributed at source. This is not a spread of sites: sacredlotus.com alone supplies 317 of the 332. They carry the heaviest ranking discount of any sourced tier, and the few taken from flashcard sites are being removed. |
| Unsourced | 2 | Entries whose source was lost in extraction. Shown with no source claim. These are being removed as they are found. |
Only human evidence reaches the index. An earlier version of this database held 541 protocols derived from animal research; they are gone, and every extraction path now runs a species gate before a paper reaches the pipeline. The audit that found them, and what else it turned up, is published in full.
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. Coverage is the fraction of your query an entry addresses; its score is that coverage multiplied by a weight for what kind of source it is – study-reported 1.0, text or case report 0.9, website 0.7, unsourced 0.6. Because that is a multiplier and not a tiebreak, a website entry matching your query exactly still scores below a study matching three quarters of it. That is the whole mechanism – fuzzy string matching over a curated index, discounted by source. There is no model and nothing is learned from your searches. The percentage on a card is that discounted score, so two entries with the same text similarity show different percentages. It is not clinical confidence and it is not a claim that the treatment works.
606 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.
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. Write to info@acuiq.com. What extraction at this scale reveals about the literature itself is written up under Research.