All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it not a poison. Paracelsus

Most safety rules are subtractive. They remove an option and leave the rest of the decision alone. The classical forbidden points are not like that, and the reason is worth stating plainly: they are forbidden because of what they are held to do. Points said to move a pregnancy along are avoided while a pregnancy is meant to continue, and they are the standard choice when it is meant to end. Same points, opposite instruction, and the thing that flips it is the week.

Two readings, one field

67 points in this catalogue carry a caution naming pregnancy. Read as a flat prohibition, some of those rows contradict themselves: the point warns against pregnancy and lists labour induction among the things it treats. That is not a data error. It is one field trying to hold two clinical situations.

AcuiQ separates them explicitly:

  • Gestational. The point is needled during a pregnancy that is meant to continue – morning sickness at fourteen weeks, a musculoskeletal complaint in the second trimester. Here the caution and the indication genuinely disagree, and the disagreement is flagged for review rather than rendered as though both were settled.
  • Labour. The point is needled at term to bring on or ease delivery, or where expulsion is the intended outcome. Here the caution and the indication are the same fact seen from two sides, and nothing needs correcting.

Postpartum use is neither. The pregnancy is over, so a pregnancy caution has stopped applying and the row is read normally.

What the catalogue actually says

BL60 and BL67 are the clearest example, and their entries say so in as many words: traditionally forbidden in pregnancy, and the points used to bring on labour at term. The same entries close on the instruction that survives either reading – in pregnancy, needle only on a clear obstetric indication.

A second group is anatomical rather than classical. The lower Conception Vessel points sit over the uterus, and their cautions turn on the gravid abdomen rather than on any property of the point: avoid needling over the gravid uterus after the first trimester, and where used, needle shallowly and on a clear obstetric indication. That caution behaves like the pneumothorax cautions described in Reading a point warning – it is about what is underneath, and it does not reverse at term.

Where the evidence sits

The classical prohibition and the trial evidence do not fully agree, and the catalogue records both rather than picking a winner. Several of the forbidden points carry entries citing controlled data (Carr 2015) that found no excess of preterm birth or stillbirth of the kind the prohibition anticipates. That is a real finding and it is on the page, with its citation. It is also not a clearance: the prohibition is older than the trials, the trials are not large, and a practitioner deciding for one patient is not doing meta-analysis.

The honest position, and the one AcuiQ takes, is that this is a live disagreement between two bodies of knowledge. The catalogue’s job is to show you both, labelled, with the source attached. It is not to resolve them for you, and a tool that picked a side here without saying so would be making a clinical decision it has no standing to make.

Reading a row

Three questions settle almost every case. Is the caution about the point or about the tissue under it? Is the pregnancy meant to continue? And does the source predate the trial evidence the same page cites? A row that survives all three is telling you something. A row that fails the first is telling you about anatomy, which does not negotiate.