Korean hand and Saam acupuncture

Korean hand acupuncture and Saam acupuncture are two methods developed in Korea. Korean hand acupuncture treats the whole body through points on the hand, read as a small map of the body, much as ear acupuncture reads the outer ear. Saam acupuncture needles up to four points, chosen from the five transport points by a rule of tonifying one channel and sedating another. This page sets out where each came from, how it chooses points, and what its trials report.

Korean hand acupuncture

A 2024 review of acupuncture in the United States by Smith and colleagues credits the hand system to Yu Tae-u, a Korean acupuncturist, in the 1970s, and groups it with the ear and the abdomen as a microsystem: a part of the body held to carry a map of the whole. A 2013 trial by Koo and colleagues, which spells the name Yoo, calls the method Koryo hand therapy and states that it had been used to treat two million Koreans while remaining rarely used in Western medicine. Korean papers also use the name sooji chim, glossed in the title of a 2002 study by Jeong and colleagues as Koryo hand acupuncture therapy.

Ro and Gong, of the orthopaedic surgery department at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, describe in a 2020 commentary how hand acupuncture therapy treats the hand as a homunculus, a scale model of the body, and how its practitioners hold that stimulating the hand improves the health of the body; they add that the concept needs scientific evidence. Trials name the hand points with their own labels: K-K9, which a 2013 review by Cheong and colleagues locates on the middle phalanx of the fourth finger, and K-D2, which Koo and colleagues locate on the side of the last phalanx of the index finger. These labels are not codes in AcuiQ’s catalogue. A 2020 comparison by Wang and colleagues set eight schools of hand acupuncture side by side, Korean finger needling among them, and found that they locate points and needle them in different ways.

Needles, pellets, plasters and moxa

Trials of the hand system stimulate its points in four ways. Needles: a 2012 trial by Park and Cha left them in 16 places on the hand for 25 minutes. Press pellets need no needle: in the trials by Schlager and Boehler, a disc or a seed was taped onto K-K9 30 minutes before anaesthesia and left for at least 24 hours. Anaesthetists in Korea have taped capsicum plaster over the point instead: Koo and colleagues describe the plaster as a round patch 1.1 cm across, containing powdered capsicum, that is used in Korea for pain. One group in India used capsaicin ointment. Hand moxibustion warms the points: a 2009 study by Shin and colleagues gave women with premenstrual syndrome 10 sessions of either hand needling or hand moxibustion, in a design without random allocation, and reported lower symptom scores in both groups than in a control group.

Trials of Korean hand stimulation for postoperative nausea and vomiting

The six randomised trials below tested hand points against nausea and vomiting after surgery, the field in which stimulation of PC06 (Neiguan) at the wrist, which trials call P6, is also studied. Each blinded at least the people assessing the outcome.

The Cheong review pooled 30 randomised trials of acupoint stimulation for postoperative nausea and vomiting, and counted the Boehler trial among six trials of PC06 acupressure against a sham, stating that K-K9 corresponds to PC06. Those six together reported nausea in 31% of patients given acupressure and 43% given the sham in the first 24 hours. The review rated the Boehler trial moderate in quality, and reported that most of the trials it included did not describe how they were blinded.

Other trials of the hand system

A 2004 trial by Park and colleagues randomised 150 women having an abdominal hysterectomy to capsicum plaster at the hand point K-A20 or one of two controls, a sham and a placebo, and reported moderate or severe sore throat at 24 hours in none of the first group, against 16% and 19%. A 2026 systematic review of postoperative sore throat by Moulder and colleagues summarises that trial as reducing how often sore throat occurred at 24 hours but not how severe it was. The Park and Cha trial randomised 42 women with irritable bowel syndrome to hand needling or needling at hand areas unrelated to the bowel, and reported less loose stool, bloating, abdominal discomfort and pain in the first group, with no difference in stress, mental health or heart rate variability. A 2015 review of records by Ochi, without a control group, describes 29 children given needle-free hand therapy after tonsillectomy, all of whom accepted it; their mean pain score fell from 5.0 to 3.1 out of 10.

AcuiQ’s pages for sore throat after surgery and irritable bowel syndrome list the protocols individual studies prescribed, each with its citation.

Saam acupuncture

A 2015 review by Park and Kim of Wonkwang University dates the first Saam manuscript to between 1644 and 1742, in the middle of the Joseon dynasty, and attributes it to a Korean Buddhist monk whose name is unknown. The earliest date comes from the manuscript’s quotation of Chimgugyeongheombang, a Korean acupuncture text published in 1644. The oldest copy that survives, Essential Rhymes on Acupuncture and Moxibustion by Master Saam, adds the clinical experience of a later practitioner, Gy-san. Park and Kim trace the limit of four needles to a line in the Dongeuibogam, the Treasured Mirror of Eastern Medicine, that warns against needling the whole body and advises one needle and at most four.

How Saam acupuncture chooses its four points

Saam acupuncture draws its points from the five transport points of each channel, each of which belongs to one of the five phases, and Park and Kim set out the rule for combining them. It starts from the 69th chapter of the Nanjing, the Classic of Difficult Issues, which says to fill the mother of a depleted channel and drain the child of a replete one. Saam added the phase that controls the depleted one. For a channel diagnosed as deficient, the practitioner tonifies the mother phase’s point on that channel and on the mother phase’s own channel, and sedates the controlling phase’s point on both. For a deficient lung channel, a metal channel whose mother is earth and whose controller is fire, that gives four points: tonify the earth points LU09 (Taiyuan) and SP03 (Taibai), and sedate the fire points LU10 (Yuji) and HT08 (Shaofu). For an excess, the order turns over: the controller’s points are tonified and the child’s points sedated, so an excess of the lung channel tonifies LU10 and HT08 and sedates the water points, LU05 (Chize) on the lung channel and KD10 (Yingu) on the kidney channel.

The manuscript holds 240 treatments, according to Park and Kim: 100 regular forms built on the 69th chapter, 140 irregular forms built on the 73rd and 75th, and further special points. Of the published Saam case studies they found, 85% used a plain tonifying or sedating formula. A 2021 text-mining study by Jang and colleagues compared the point prescriptions for 14 diseases in the Saam text, the Dongeuibogam and Chimgugyeongheombang, and found the Saam prescriptions the most different of the three.

Trials of Saam acupuncture

Park and Kim searched four Korean databases, PubMed and Google Scholar and found 28 case studies and 17 clinical studies, mostly of musculoskeletal pain and of the autonomic nervous system. Most of the case reports combined Saam acupuncture with other treatments, which they say makes its effect hard to separate. Three compared Saam plus general body acupuncture with general body acupuncture alone, a design they call unsuitable because the two groups receive different amounts of stimulation, and they warn that a sham needled at non-points near the five transport points could act like the real points.

A 2022 trial by Lee and colleagues randomised 24 people with functional dyspepsia to Saam acupuncture three times a week for four weeks plus usual care, or usual care alone. It found no difference in overall dyspepsia symptom scores at four weeks, differences at the follow-ups at eight and 12 weeks, and no adverse events related to the needling. The authors name the lack of a sham group as a major limitation. A 2015 pilot study by Jeong and colleagues gave Saam acupuncture to nine patients with arm lymphoedema after breast cancer surgery for six weeks, with no control group, and reported smaller arm measurements. A 2011 study by Hwang and colleagues gave six night-shift nurses Saam and sham acupuncture in turn and reported heart rate variability measures consistent with lower sympathetic activity after Saam acupuncture. AcuiQ lists the protocols studies prescribed for functional dyspepsia and breast cancer-related lymphoedema.

What the sources cannot settle

The six nausea trials each stimulated one hand point, and most compared it with inactive tape or ointment; only Koo and colleagues also put the same capsicum plaster somewhere other than an acupuncture point, which separates the point from the plaster. The Cheong review pooled the Boehler trial as a PC06 trial, so it cannot say whether the hand map adds anything to the wrist point. Ro and Gong state that the map itself still needs evidence, and Wang and colleagues found that hand schools disagree on where the points are. For Saam acupuncture, Park and Kim write that the classical diagnostic criteria for choosing a channel are too ambiguous for selecting the correct one; the Saam trials are small, and the randomised trial by Lee and colleagues had no sham. Sham acupuncture explains why the choice of control matters.