Scalp acupuncture needles lines and zones on the scalp rather than single points. Two kinds of map are in use. The international standard builds its fourteen lines from classical channel points. Most of the schools that grew up beside it, in China and in Japan, instead project the brain or the body onto the scalp. This page sets out the standard lines, the schools, and what systematic reviews of scalp acupuncture trials report.
The international standard lines
WHO’s Standard acupuncture nomenclature, part 2, published by its Western Pacific office in 1991, records that scalp acupuncture had been used in China since 1970. A regional meeting in Tokyo in 1984 adopted a standard nomenclature for it, and a WHO scientific group in Geneva in 1989 adopted it again with diagrams. The nomenclature codes each line MS, from micro-system and scalp points, and defines it by the classical points it runs from and to, with needles threaded along the line from one point towards the next. A footnote explains that some lines were formerly named after the brain functions beneath them; the standard renamed them by surface anatomy to make them easier to find, and states that their relation to the brain beneath is unchanged.
AcuiQ catalogues the fourteen lines as MS01 to MS14 and lists them under scalp lines; Reading a point code explains the padding. A cun is the proportional unit of body measurement, explained in Measuring in cun.
| AcuiQ | Pinyin | Name | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
MS01 | é zhōng xiàn | Middle Line of Forehead | 1 cun straight down from GV24 (Shenting), along the channel |
MS02 | é páng yī xiàn | Lateral Line 1 of Forehead | 1 cun straight down from BL03 (Meichong), along the channel |
MS03 | é páng èr xiàn | Lateral Line 2 of Forehead | 1 cun straight down from GB15 (Toulinqi), along the channel |
MS04 | é páng sān xiàn | Lateral Line 3 of Forehead | 1 cun straight down from a point 0.75 cun medial to ST08 (Touwei) |
MS05 | dǐng zhōng xiàn | Middle Line of Vertex | From GV20 (Baihui) to GV21 (Qianding), along the midline of the head |
MS06 | dǐng niè qián xié xiàn | Anterior Oblique Line of Vertex-Temporal | From Qianshencong, 1 cun in front of GV20, obliquely to GB06 (Xuanli) |
MS07 | dǐng niè hòu xié xiàn | Posterior Oblique Line of Vertex-Temporal | From GV20 obliquely to GB07 (Qubin) |
MS08 | dǐng páng yī xiàn | Lateral Line 1 of Vertex | 1.5 cun lateral to MS05: 1.5 cun backward from BL07 (Tongtian), along the channel |
MS09 | dǐng páng èr xiàn | Lateral Line 2 of Vertex | 2.25 cun lateral to MS05: 1.5 cun backward from GB17 (Zhengying), along the channel |
MS10 | niè qián xiàn | Anterior Temporal Line | From GB04 (Hanyan) to GB06 |
MS11 | niè hòu xiàn | Posterior Temporal Line | From GB08 (Shuaigu) to GB07 |
MS12 | zhěn shàng zhèng zhōng xiàn | Upper-Middle Line of Occiput | From GV18 (Qiangjian) to GV17 (Naohu) |
MS13 | zhěn shàng páng xiàn | Upper-Lateral Line of Occiput | 0.5 cun lateral to MS12 and parallel to it |
MS14 | zhěn xià páng xiàn | Lower-Lateral Line of Occiput | 2 cun straight down from BL09 (Yuzhen) |
The schools
Jiao Shunfa began charting the scalp in 1971 by projecting areas of the cerebral cortex onto it, among them a Motor Area, a Sensory Area, and areas for speech, balance, and vertigo and hearing. A 2012 excerpt from the textbook Chinese Scalp Acupuncture by Jason and Linda Hao, who learned the method from Jiao, records that a national Chinese textbook, Acupuncture and Moxibustion, recognised his system in 1977. In the cases it describes, the needles in the Motor Area are twirled at 200 revolutions a minute or more for one to three minutes. A 2023 review by Ye and colleagues questions the basis of Jiao’s map: it finds that more than 57% of its 19 stimulation zones are unrelated to the area of cortex directly beneath them, and it traces his projection to marks that neurosurgeons draw on the skull before an operation.
The Hao excerpt describes two other early maps. Fang Yunpeng drew a homunculus lying face down on the scalp, its head at the forehead and its legs towards the back of the skull; the Ye review credits Fang, not Jiao, with the five zones on the forehead that Jiao’s system later carried. Zhu Mingqing created bands of treatment on the scalp, and a 2016 comparison of the schools by Xu and colleagues notes that Zhu’s method keeps the needles in for long periods, where Jiao’s and the international standard’s require fast rotation. The same comparison finds Fang’s school needling down to the bone’s outer membrane, and the others beneath the tendinous layer of the scalp.
Yamamoto New Scalp Acupuncture (YNSA) comes from Japan. A 2018 overview by Ogal dates it to the 1960s and its founder, Toshikatsu Yamamoto, an anaesthetist and pain specialist, who described a new map of the body on the head and matched it to zones of an abdominal examination he adapted. YNSA points can be stimulated without a needle: a 2007 case report by Yamamoto and colleagues describes treating an 18-month-old girl with weakness on one side after a stroke using a low-level laser on the points.
A 2021 comparison of ten schools by Zhang and colleagues found them similar in the conditions they treat and in the angle and depth of insertion, and different in manipulation, retention time, theory, and the conditions each assigns to the same region of the scalp. It concludes that no one yet knows which school works better.
AcuiQ records the stimulus a protocol used as its modality, separately from the points, so a scalp protocol is filed under needling or electroacupuncture according to its source; Reading a protocol explains the field.
What reviews report
| Review | Condition | Trials, participants | Comparison | What it found |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wang 2012 | Acute ischaemic stroke | 8 trials, 538 | Conventional Western drug treatment | Better neurological deficit scores in 6 trials; risk of bias unclear, and the authors say the benefit is possibly overvalued because the trials’ methods were generally weak. |
| Park 2025 | Stroke | Overview of 7 systematic reviews | Scalp acupuncture against controls, and against body acupuncture data from a Cochrane review | Certainty of evidence for scalp acupuncture on its own low, owing to weaknesses in method. |
| Zhang 2024 | Spasticity after stroke | 16 trials | Scalp acupuncture with rehabilitation against rehabilitation alone | Lower spasticity scores (modified Ashworth scale, mean difference 0.56) and better motor and daily-living scores. |
| Xue 2022 | Cerebral palsy in children | 11 trials, 731 children | Conventional rehabilitation | Better effective rate, mental and motor development scores in the scalp acupuncture groups. |
| Cheng 2024 | Cerebral palsy in children | 20 trials, 1,797 | Body, scalp or ear acupuncture against no acupuncture, mostly physical or occupational therapy | Gross motor function scores 5.93 points higher; scalp trials pooled with body and ear trials, all conducted in China. |
| Liu 2019 | Autism in children | 14 trials, 968 | Behavioural and educational interventions | Lower autism rating scores; the authors ask for high-quality trials before wide use. |
AcuiQ’s pages for stroke, hemiplegia after stroke, spasticity after stroke, cerebral palsy and autism spectrum disorder list the protocols individual studies prescribed, each with its citation. Stroke recovery reports the reviews of acupuncture after stroke more widely.
What the reviews cannot settle
The five meta-analyses in the table compare scalp acupuncture with drugs, rehabilitation, education or no acupuncture, never with a sham. Most add scalp acupuncture to rehabilitation or another treatment and compare the result with that treatment alone, so the difference they measure includes everything that comes with extra sessions, not only the needles; Sham acupuncture explains why that matters. Wang and colleagues found that their trials had not documented adverse events at all. And because the schools map the scalp differently, “scalp acupuncture” in one trial may not mean the same lines or zones as in the next, which the 2021 comparison of schools gives as one of the field’s main open problems.