Acupuncture point references compared

A point reference says where an acupuncture point is and what it is used for. The references practitioners and answer engines name list many of the same points, and they differ in what a reader can check behind an entry: an agreed location, an author's text, a clinic's case reports or a cited paper. Each is described below from its publisher's own page or store listing, accessed October 2026. AcuiQ, which publishes this page, is described from its own code.

What is the best acupuncture point reference for practitioners?

Each reference suits a different job: for finding and needling a point, a location atlas such as A Manual of Acupuncture, with its illustrations, needling notes and videos; for one agreed location to teach or research from, the WHO standard; for seeing which points published sources chose for a symptom, and opening each source, a symptom index that keeps its citations, such as AcuiQ; and for acupressure applied to oneself, PointFinder, which is written for self-treatment.

Me & Qi, Tsubonet and the Acupuncture Assistant app each carry a location and a list of uses in one entry, and they differ in where those come from.

Location atlases

The Journal of Chinese Medicine Publications' Android listing for A Manual of Acupuncture describes every channel point and extraordinary point from the textbook with English and Chinese names, category, location and location notes, an illustration, needling instructions and cautions, actions, clinical application and combinations, with audio of the Chinese pronunciation and a video of location and needling for each point. Readers can add notes to any field, build their own point groups and test themselves on them, and search within one field such as indications. After the free trial, a reader who does not subscribe keeps the Lung channel and samples of the rest.

The WHO standard was published, its IRIS record says, after acupuncturists were reported to differ by up to 25% in the points they used, which caused difficulties in research and education. It sets out a method for locating points, including proportional bone measurement in B-cun, and gives locations for 361 points. Of 92 disputed locations, meetings with member states standardised 86; for the remaining six, LI19, LI20, PC8, PC9, GB30 and GV26, the text gives an alternative location under a heading called Remarks. It says nothing about what a point is used for. Its entry for PC6 places the point between the palmaris longus and flexor carpi radialis tendons, 2 B-cun proximal to the palmar wrist crease, with a note for a forearm that has no palmaris longus tendon.

Point dictionaries on the web

Me & Qi's entry for Hegu, LI-4 gives other names in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, location, needling depth and angle, actions, a list of indications, a commentary, common combinations and cautions, followed by a section quoting the Ling Shu, the Zhen Jiu Jia Yi Jing and the Zhen Jiu Da Cheng. The quotations are attributed to each book by title; the indication list carries no citation per item. Me & Qi was founded in 2019 by Arnaud and Junjun, who studied at the Kuala Lumpur Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, according to its about page, and the same site runs a symptom questionnaire and sells herbs and formulas.

Tsubonet collects case reports, mostly from Japanese clinics, into a database and recomputes its statistics as cases arrive. Its home page counted 386 points, 5,640 cases and 60 clinics. A point's page shows it on a body diagram and lists the symptoms it was used for in those cases; registering adds views through skin and muscle. Its about page says only clinics that fix point locations to the millimetre upload cases, and that the site's information follows Seidō-shin, the needling system of the Seidō Association (整動協会). Its point list sets classical names such as 合谷 beside positions named by spinal level, such as C6(3.5).

PointFinder began, its about page says, as a booklet Kevin T. Boyd published himself in 1982, became a HyperCard file in 1988 and has been a web page since about 2002. It is organised by body area and symptom for acupressure, and its bibliography names Deadman's manual and Giovanni Maciocia's Foundations of Chinese Medicine among its five books. Its instructions give locations as approximate, in the thumb and palm widths of the person being treated, and mark some conditions with a caution or a warning, for which acupressure only supplements professional care.

A point app

TCM Points' Acupuncture Assistant, first released in 2010, holds 390 points: the regular channel points and 29 extra points, each with the meaning of its Chinese name, category, an illustrated location, actions and indications. Typing a sign, symptom or desired action returns suggested points, and an AI agent called Lao Tzu suggests treatment protocols and discusses cases, with free credits to try it and unlimited use on the Pro plan. The site says its content is based on the works of renowned authors and names none of them.

AcuiQ

AcuiQ indexes point selections that other people published and lets a reader search them by symptom. Each entry carries its source and one of four labels: Study-reported, Text or case report, Website or Unsourced. A link counts as Study-reported only when it is a DOI, a PubMed or PMC record or a Europe PMC record, so a prescription copied from a general website is labelled Website. Results rank by how much of the query an entry's symptoms cover, weighted by that label, and every multi-point protocol ranks above every single-point entry. Where a study on the same symptom chose some of the same points, the result names those points and that study. How AcuiQ is built covers the pipeline; reading a protocol covers a result card.

A point page, such as PC06 (Neiguan), gives a location, cautions, classical categories, indications, the protocols that use the point with each one's source, and the points sources most often chose alongside it. The location line and the indication list carry no source: PC06's location reads 2 thumb widths above the wrist crease between the same two tendons, and nothing on the page says where that sentence came from, while each protocol below it links its paper. AcuiQ also takes its point categories from Deadman's manual, and the manual's indication index and point-group actions are the source of some entries labelled Text or case report. Codes follow AcuiQ's own zero-padded catalogue, which reading a point code maps to notations such as PC6. Programs can query the same data through an MCP server, whose tools include symptom search, protocol search and point lookup.

Store prices and app features change with each release; the figures here are as each listing showed them in October 2026.