Acupressure
合谷
Hegu sits in the web of muscle between the thumb and index finger, on the back of the hand. Bring thumb and finger together and the mound that rises is it; relax the hand and press into the middle of that mound. It is one of the four command points, classically associated with the face and head. It is avoided in pregnancy.
取穴
Everything below is done on your own hand, with your other hand. No diagram is needed, and if a description does not land, try the second one — different hands answer to different instructions.
There is a second method, and it is the one taught to beginners in China because it needs no anatomy at all. Spread the thumb and index finger of the left hand apart. Lay the crease of your right thumb — the line where the thumb bends — across the web of the left hand. Now bend the right thumb down. Where its tip lands is Hegu.
You will know you are in the right place before you know the anatomy. Pressed correctly the spot is distinctly more sensitive than the tissue a centimetre in any direction, and often gives a dull, spreading ache rather than a sharp one. That spreading feeling has a name — 得气 dé qì, obtaining the qi — and in the classical literature it is the sign that a point has been found.
按法
The grip that works best is a clamp. Put your thumb on the point on the back of the hand and your index finger underneath in the palm, and squeeze the web between them rather than pushing at it from one side.
Use the pad of the thumb, not the nail and not a tool. Small circles are fine if steady pressure feels dull; the tradition uses both. Stop when the minute is up rather than when it stops hurting, and expect the spot to be tender for an hour or two afterwards the first few times.
面口合谷收
Hegu is one of the 四总穴 sì zǒng xué, the four command points — a mnemonic quatrain that assigns each of four points to a region of the body. The line for this one is 面口合谷收: for the face and the mouth, gather at Hegu. Everything above the neck is its classical territory.
Compiled by Yang Jizhou from his family’s manuscripts and the surviving classical literature.
It is worth saying plainly what that list is and is not. It is a description of where a point sits in a two-thousand-year-old body of writing. It is not a claim about outcomes, and we make none. If something above the neck has been going on for weeks, that belongs with a clinician who can look at it.
孕忌
This is not a technicality we are being careful about for form’s sake. It is the single most consistent caution in the classical acupuncture literature, and it is repeated in every modern Chinese textbook. If you are pregnant, skip this page and use the wrist.
慎
The whole point of writing the cautions this specifically is that self-applied pressure is safe precisely when it stays inside them. Outside them it is not dangerous so much as beside the point: it occupies the hour in which something else should have happened.
配伍
In a written reading Hegu turns up beside a pattern rather than beside a complaint. It is named most often where the tradition sees something stuck at the surface or in the head, and it is generally paired with a second point rather than used alone.
The classical pairing is Hegu with 太冲 Tàichōng, Liver 3, on the top of the foot — the two together are called the 四关 sì guān, the four gates, and they are the standard combination when the description is of tension held and not released. For the emptier patterns the point named is usually Zusanli instead, and for restlessness in the chest it is Neiguan.
Which points a reading names depends on which pattern it describes, and that is the part a questionnaire and a photograph are actually for.
Questions
Because the classical literature says so, consistently and for centuries. The sources describe a strong downward-moving action at this point and list it among those avoided while pregnant, alongside Sanyinjiao and points on the lower abdomen and lower back. Modern Chinese textbooks keep the caution. We keep it too, and suggest Neiguan on the wrist instead.
It should feel like a dull, spreading ache that you could hold a conversation through. Sharp, electric, burning or radiating pain means stop and move on. The classical sign that a point has been found is that spreading heaviness, called dé qì, and it arrives at moderate pressure rather than at maximum.
The usual practice is both, one after the other, thirty to sixty seconds each. Nothing is lost by doing one, and people often find one side markedly more tender than the other, which is worth noticing but does not mean anything on its own.
The others
Which of these three a reading names has less to do with what hurts than with what the rest of the picture is doing. The same headache is approached from the hand in one pattern and from the leg in another, and a reading that named a point from the complaint alone would be guessing in public. Read the five patterns before deciding which of the three below is likely to be yours.
Before you press anything, read the general rules — how the cun is measured on your own hand, how long to hold, and the list of situations in which none of this is the right thing to be doing. The other half of what a reading suggests is on the food pages, and costs nothing either.
The reading
This page describes Hegu for anyone who might use it. A reading is written for one person: thirty questions, one photograph of your tongue, a pattern named in the tradition’s own vocabulary, and the two or three points that belong beside it — in English, within 48 hours.