---
title: "Reading a point warning"
url: "https://acuiq.com/wiki/safety/reading-a-point-warning"
updated: 2026-10-13
last_verified: 2026-10-13
license: CC-BY-4.0
license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
section: "safety"
basis: "Classical and modern"
audience: "Practitioner"
published: "2026-08-29"
reading_minutes: 6
sources: 7
---

# Reading a point warning

_What the cautions on a point page are, where they come from, and the one failure they can hide._

An aircraft checklist has two kinds of item on it, and pilots are taught to tell them apart. Some are true of the aircraft: this engine will not restart above that altitude. Others are true of the situation: do not do this _in icing conditions_. The first kind never changes. The second is a question about the day. A point warning works the same way, and reading one well starts with deciding which kind it is.

## What is on the page

759 of the 773 points in this catalogue carry a warnings field, counted from the database at the moment this page is served. It is free text taken from the sources the point was catalogued from, not a computed safety score, and it is shown as written rather than summarised into a rating. That is deliberate: a caution compressed into a symbol loses the clause that says when it applies.

The 14 without one are not scattered through the catalogue. Every acupoint and every auricular point carries the field; the ones left are the [scalp lines](/atlas), which this catalogue holds as lines rather than as single points. A blank there records that no caution came with the line, not that none applies.

## Anatomical cautions

The first kind names a structure under the needle. 68 points carry a caution naming pneumothorax, the pleura or the lung beneath the needle – mostly the points over the upper back, the chest and the supraclavicular fossa, where the pleural dome sits close to the surface. A caution of that kind does not depend on the patient. It is a claim about where things are, it applies on every day to every patient, and it governs needling depth and angle rather than point selection.

That is what the caution is for. It is not a guarantee that every one of them sits over a lung. The warnings field records what a source printed about a point, and nothing in this catalogue reads that text against the location field on the same row, so the figure above counts source text rather than anatomy. [XC09](/points/xc09) carried a pneumothorax caution until 2 October 2026 while recording its own location on the lower abdomen, level with CV04, and the parietal pleura descends posteriorly to the twelfth rib and no further. The caution had travelled with the text it was copied from. It now names the peritoneal cavity and bowel beneath the point, and the gravid uterus. Read a depth caution against the location printed beside it rather than on its own.

Pneumothorax leads that list in the literature as well as in this catalogue. [White’s cumulative review](https://doi.org/10.1136/aim.22.3.122) of 715 reported adverse events found pneumothorax and central nervous system injury the most common trauma, against a serious-event rate its twelve prospective surveys put at 0.05 per 10,000 treatments. The hazard is rare, and it is the one the sources warn about most.

The catalogue has no depth field and no angle field, and no caution in it prints a depth in numbers. Where a caution says to avoid deep perpendicular needling, or to needle obliquely, the clause is a source’s warning or a correction to one, not a technique instruction AcuiQ added. The five Meihua points on the upper abdomen, [`XC11A`](/points/xc11a) to XC11E, have a source that gives a number: 0.3 to 0.5 thumb widths for needling them. Their caution keeps only “needle shallowly”, over the peritoneal cavity above the stomach. AcuiQ prints no depth, its own or a source’s: depth is a function of the patient’s build and the practitioner’s training, and a number printed without either is worse than no number.

## Conditional cautions

The second kind names a condition the patient may or may not have: a bleeding disorder, epilepsy, an acute abdomen, uncontrolled hypertension. These are the ones that need the clause read in full.

5 points carry a caution naming hypertension, in 4 wordings:

- [AT17](/points/at17): “avoid in hypertensive or anxious patients”
- [IN06](/points/in06): “avoid in hypertensive patients”
- [LI11](/points/li11) and [LV03](/points/lv03): “monitor blood pressure and avoid strong stimulation where hypertension is uncontrolled or unstable; hypertensive crisis is a medical emergency”
- [XH32](/points/xh32): “caution in severely hypertensive patients”

Caution, avoid and monitor are different instructions, and the catalogue keeps whichever one the source used rather than levelling them to one word.

One field can hold both kinds at once. [LU02](/points/lu02) reads “avoid deep needling due to proximity to lungs and blood vessels; contraindicated in hemoptysis”, where the first clause is a claim about where the lung is and the second is a question about the patient.

4 of the pleural cautions counted above carry a patient condition in the same field: [BL15](/points/bl15), [GB21](/points/gb21), [LI15](/points/li15) and [LU02](/points/lu02). Read a warnings field clause by clause rather than filing the whole row under one kind.

## The failure to watch for

A point can warn against the very thing the same row says it treats. It happens because source catalogues print indications and contraindications in one block of text, and a parser that splits on the wrong delimiter files the second half as something the point is _for_. The result renders both blocks on the same page, and neither is marked as the wrong one.

This is the defect class that coverage metrics cannot see. An audit that counts empty fields scores such a row as complete, because every field is populated. Only a check that reads the two fields _against each other_ finds it, which is why AcuiQ keeps that comparison as its own definition rather than as a line inside a report: 17 condition rules, each pairing what a warning clause names against what an indication would have to look like for the two to be the same condition. The rows that fail them today are listed in Nothing in This Literature Ever Fails, counted with the same rules when that page is served.

Bidirectional indications are normal and are not the defect. ST25 is used for constipation and for diarrhoea, and that is regulation rather than contradiction. Only a caution naming the treated condition counts.

## What to do with one

Treat the warnings field as a pointer, not as a verdict. The cautions panel on a point page does not name the source its text came from. The protocols listed below it name or link theirs, and every result card, in a search or on a symptom page, says which kind of source its entry came from and carries the caveat that goes with that kind – a study-reported prescription and a line from a website are labelled differently, and [How AcuiQ is built](/wiki/method/how-acuiq-is-built) sets out what each label means. Where a caution matters to a decision, take it to a practitioner rather than acting on the panel alone.

The one case where a contradiction has a real resolution rather than a parsing cause is pregnancy, and it has [its own page](/wiki/safety/pregnancy-and-the-forbidden-points).

### Sources

1. LU02 catalogue entry, warnings field as rendered — /points/lu02
2. XC09 catalogue entry, location and warnings fields as rendered — /points/xc09
3. XC11A catalogue entry, one of the Meihua group, warnings field as rendered — /points/xc11a
4. White A, A cumulative review of the range and incidence of significant adverse events associated with acupuncture, Acupunct Med 2004;22(3):122–33 — https://doi.org/10.1136/aim.22.3.122
5. 梅花穴 (Meihua), Zhongyi Baike, location and needling depth — https://www.zhongyibaike.com/wiki/%E6%A2%85%E8%8A%B1%E7%A9%B4
6. Ropper AE, Commentary on “Mini-Open Intercostal Retroperitoneal Approach for Upper Lumbar Spine Lateral Interbody Fusion”, Neurospine 2023;20(2):564–6 — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10323337/
7. How AcuiQ is built – ranking and sources — /wiki/method/how-acuiq-is-built