Acupressure
内关
Neiguan sits on the inside of the forearm, about three finger-widths above the wrist crease, in the groove between the two tendons that stand up when you press your thumb and little finger together. Classically it is the point for the chest, the heart and the stomach. It is the one the elasticated travel wristbands press.
取穴
This point is measured rather than felt for, and the measuring is done on your own body. Chinese medicine uses a proportional unit called the 寸 cùn, and one version of it — 同身寸 tóng shēn cùn, the same-body inch — is defined by your own hand, so a tall person and a short one both get it right.
Some people have only one visible tendon there, and a few have none. That is an ordinary anatomical variation and not a problem: use the midline of the forearm at the same level, and go by tenderness. Pressed accurately the spot is noticeably more sensitive than the tissue on either side of it.
按法
Neiguan is a soft place, so the pressure needed here is less than at Hegu. Support the back of the forearm with your fingers and press in with the pad of the thumb.
If your thumb tires, press with the knuckle of a bent index finger instead. Small slow circles work as well as static pressure, and many people find that this is the one point where breathing matters as much as the pressure: a long, slow exhale through the hold changes what it feels like.
心胸胃
The three-character summary students learn for this point is 心胸胃 — heart, chest, stomach. It is the confluent point of the 阴维脉 yīn wéi mài, the yin linking vessel, one of the eight extraordinary vessels, and its classical territory is the whole area behind the breastbone and above the navel.
Compiled by Huangfu Mi, the earliest surviving systematic text on the points and their locations.
One modern fact belongs here because it is checkable rather than because it proves anything: the elasticated wristbands sold in every airport for motion sickness have a plastic stud that sits on this point, and the manufacturers name it as Nei-Kuan on the packet. That is a piece of history — an eighteen-hundred-year-old point location surviving into a chemist’s shelf — and not a claim about what pressing it will do for you.
慎
People with an ongoing heart condition, an arrhythmia, or a pacemaker should ask the clinician looking after them before adding pressure at this point to anything. That is not a legal formality; it is what a careful practitioner would say in the room.
配伍
Neiguan is the point our practitioners name most often for the two patterns that keep people awake. In yin deficiency the description is heat rising in the evening and a mind that will not put itself down; in blood deficiency it is waking at three with nothing anchoring the mind. Neiguan is named for both, usually alongside a food suggestion and an earlier bedtime rather than instead of them.
It is also the point without a pregnancy restriction, which makes it the default where Hegu is ruled out. Its classical partners are 公孙 Gōngsūn, Spleen 4, on the inside of the foot, and 足三里 Zusanli for the digestive side of the same picture.
The general rules for pressing anything apply here without exception, and the five patterns are what decides whether this is the right point at all.
Questions
It does not carry the classical pregnancy restriction that Hegu and Sanyinjiao carry, and it is the point most often suggested where those are ruled out. That is not the same as a recommendation. Tell your midwife or the clinician looking after you what you are doing, and stop if anything about it feels wrong.
A good number of people cannot, and some have only one. Use the midline of the inner forearm at the same level — three finger-widths above the wrist crease — and let tenderness guide the last centimetre. The point is reliably more sensitive than the tissue on either side of it.
They press the same location. The stud on those bands sits on Neiguan, and the packaging usually names it. We mention it because it is a checkable fact about where the point is, not as evidence for anything. What a band does for a given person is between them and their own experience of it.
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 Neiguan 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.