Reading a point code

A point code names a channel and a position on it. LI04 is the fourth point on the Large Intestine channel, counting from where the channel starts, and the number identifies nothing until the channel is named.

The shape of a code

Codes on the main channels are an abbreviation followed by an ordinal. The abbreviation names one of the fourteen channels that carry points of their own – the twelve organ channels, plus the Conception and Governing vessels. The ordinal counts along the channel in a fixed direction, so the first and last points are landmarks: the Lung channel runs LU01 below the collarbone to LU11 at the thumbnail, and the Bladder channel runs BL01 at the inner corner of the eye to BL67 at the little toe. Those fourteen carry the 361 classical points that the WHO nomenclature fixed in part 1 of its 1991 revision.

The ordinal is a position, not a ranking: LI04 comes before LI20 because it lies nearer the index finger, where the channel starts.

AcuiQ pads the ordinal to two digits and prints it that way everywhere: LI04, not LI4, and MS06, not MS6. Published papers pad inconsistently, so lookups here accept either form and resolve to the padded one. /points/li4 and /points/li04 are the same page.

Points off the channels

Not every named point sits on a channel. The extra points are grouped by region, and the WHO standard codes them with an EX- prefix: EX-HN for head and neck, EX-B for back, EX-CA for chest and abdomen, EX-UE for upper limbs, EX-LE for lower limbs. They are set out, with the scalp lines, in part 2 of the same revision, which names 48 of them: 15 head and neck, 9 back, 1 chest and abdomen, 11 upper limb and 12 lower limb.

Part 2 prints the prefix with a lower-case x, as Ex-HN3. The literature has since settled on the upper-case form, and so has this page. China publishes its own standard for the same points, GB/T 40997-2021, Nomenclature and location of extra points in common use, issued on 26 November 2021 by the State Administration for Market Regulation and the Standardization Administration of China, and current. Its text is served only through a browser viewer, so this page does not compare its list with the WHO one.

This catalogue does not use that prefix. It carries the same five regions under a shorter form – XH, XB, XC, XU, XL – and keeps the WHO ordinals where it holds the WHO points. Yintang between the eyebrows is Ex-HN3 in the standard and XH03 here. Taiyang at the temple is XH05. XH01 to XH15, XB01 to XB09, XC01, and XU01 to XU11 carry the WHO points in the WHO order. An EX- code carried in from a paper opens its entry here: /points/ex-hn3 goes to XH03. Ten of the WHO points are groups of sites rather than single points, and this catalogue keeps each site as its own lettered row, so a code such as EX-B2 has no single page and still has to be looked up among the rows whose codes begin XB02.

The numbering runs well past where the standard stops: against the standard's 48, this catalogue's extra-point codes reach XH47, XU28, XC25, XL26 and XB13, so an extra-point code above the WHO ordinals is AcuiQ's own and converts to nothing in either direction. The lower limb is the one place the two schemes disagree inside the WHO range, and there, as on the ear, a converted code lands on a real point instead of failing.

The standard numbers Ex-LE3 Xinei, Ex-LE4 Neixiyan and Ex-LE5 Xiyan, three ordinals for the inner knee and the eyes of the knee. This catalogue files the medial knee eye as XL05A beside its lateral twin XL05B, and fills XL03 and XL04 with Baichongwo on the thigh and Naoqing on the shin. An Ex-LE4 converted by prefix alone lands on Naoqing and an Ex-LE3 on Baichongwo, both of them real points in the wrong place. Ex-LE6 to Ex-LE12 line up again.

One more rule applies only to the extras. Several of them are not a location but a set of them, and the set is coded with a trailing letter: Sishencong, the four points around the vertex, runs XH01A to XH01D, and Bafeng, the eight points between the toes, runs XL10A to XL10H. Xiyan, the eyes of the knee, is XL05A and XL05B. A bare XL05 is not a point in this catalogue, and a prescription extracted as XL05 does not say whether one knee eye was needled or both. Sixty-four codes carry a trailing letter. Jiaji, the para-vertebral points, is the set that does not: its 29 rows run XB02C1 to XB02S5 and carry the vertebral level instead, so a converter written for a single letter drops every one of them.

Two families are coded differently again because they are not points in the same sense. The auricular points map regions of the body onto the outer ear. The scalp lines, MS01 to MS14, are lines rather than positions, and are needled along their length rather than at a spot. Part 2 locates each one from named points: MS01 is one cun straight down from GV24, and MS05 runs from GV20 to GV21 along the midline of the head. The letters stand for micro-system and scalp points.

Where AcuiQ differs from the WHO standard

Eight prefixes in this catalogue are not the WHO ones.

A point page on AcuiQ opens from the WHO form of a code as well as from the catalogue’s own: KI3 opens KD03 (Taixi), TE5 and the older SJ5 open TB05 (Waiguan), and EX-HN3 opens XH03.

The ear has no row in that table, because the WHO nomenclature does not contain the ear. Part 2 standardises basic terms, the eight extra meridians (the Conception and Governing vessels and six more that carry no points of their own), the extra points, scalp acupuncture, needles and the unit of measurement; across both parts the only point families it names are the channel points, the extra points and the scalp lines.

Part 2's introduction records that the Seoul working group developed a standard nomenclature for selected auricular points in 1987, and it reached neither part; the group that did publish one met in Lyon in 1990 and adopted a partial list. This catalogue keeps its own auricular numbering, which does not match the standard most papers follow. The two schemes share the region prefixes AH, AT, TF and HX and disagree about the numbers under them, so an ear code carried in from a paper does not fail here: it resolves to a different real point. The divergence is published as a crosswalk rather than reconciled in silence.

Codes that resolve to the wrong point

A code that cannot be resolved raises an error, and somebody sees the error. A code that resolves to the wrong point raises nothing at all. Across 48,579 point references extracted from the literature, 37 resolved silently to a point the author did not mean, because a published code carries no namespace saying which standard it belongs to. The measurement, and the crosswalk that fixes the auricular half of it, are in Auricular point code collisions.

A reader carrying a code from a paper into this catalogue, or the other way, needs to know which standard the paper used, and the crosswalk on that page lists the ear codes where the two schemes disagree.