These are real limits, not modesty. Practitioners raised every one of them, and they are accurate. A reference tool that will not say what it refuses to do is asking to be read as something it is not.

It does not differentiate patterns

Search constipation and AcuiQ 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.

The index is not innocent of the distinction. It cannot act on it. A 2021 Chinese-language paper on point selection for constipation is stored here as six entries that share one five-point base – ST25, BL25, ST37, TB06, KD06 – and differ only in the two points appended to it: LI04 and SP14 for heat, CV12 and LV03 for qi stagnation, CV04 and CV08 for cold, CV04 and BL20 for deficiency. Those pattern-qualified terms sit in the index as ordinary searchable entries, so a search for constipation returns them next to the unqualified one, ordered by text similarity, with nothing on the page to say which of them describes you. Recording a differentiation and performing one are different acts, and only the first is in scope here.

Why that distinction is the whole of the discipline, and what it means for a symptom index, is set out in patterns, symptoms and what you can look up.

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. This is a deliberate consequence of the privacy position: no account, no login and no user record, which leaves nothing for an intake to be attached to. What is kept is a per-symptom tally with a timestamp and no visitor on it, and that ranks the suggestions on the home page rather than 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 behind the pairing. For that, use a point manual. Where a point’s own entry carries a caution, what that caution is worth is a separate question – reading a point warning covers it.

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. An entry is a pointer to its citation; the judgement stays with a person.

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

AcuiQ is maintained by AcuiQ. The index is compiled, corrected, and published in-house, and no entry on this site is written from clinical experience – every one of them records what a published source prescribed, which is why each carries its citation and why the limits above are stated as plainly as they are.

This is not clinical review

No practitioner signs off on individual entries. Extraction is checked against the source for attribution and for what the source actually claimed; it is not checked against clinical judgement, because the tool does not exercise any. Treat an entry as a pointer to its citation, not as a recommendation from AcuiQ.

Commercial interest

AcuiQ sells press needles, illustrated guides drawn from this same index, a licence to the corpus as data, and – to machines rather than people – a per-request fee on three bulk exports of that same corpus, advertised on the same pages that return search results. Nothing about a result changes based on what is for sale: ranking is text similarity over the index, set out in how AcuiQ is built, and the guides print protocols the search already shows you for free. But you are reading a reference tool published by a company that also sells needles, and you should weigh it accordingly.