Acupressure
足三里
Zusanli sits on the outside of the shin, four finger-widths below the kneecap and one thumb-width out from the front edge of the shin bone, in muscle rather than on bone. It is the most pressed point in China, classically associated with digestion and with steadiness in general. Press it with the thumb for a minute on each leg.
取穴
Sit on a chair with the foot flat on the floor and the knee bent to a right angle. This point is easier to find bent than straight, because the landmark you start from only appears when the knee is bent.
There is a rougher method that works surprisingly well. Sit with the knee bent and lay your palm over the kneecap of the same leg, fingers pointing down the shin. The tip of your middle finger falls very close to the point; slide it a thumb-width to the outside and press. If the spot is right it is noticeably more tender than the tissue around it, and pressing it often produces a dull ache that travels down the leg.
按法
There is more muscle here than at the other two points, so this one takes real pressure. Most people use the thumb of the same-side hand, leaning their body weight into it rather than gripping.
A walk afterwards is part of the traditional habit rather than an afterthought, particularly where the pattern being described is dampness. If the ache travels down towards the foot, that is the classical 得气 dé qì sensation and is expected. If it is sharp, electric, or shoots into the foot like a shock, stop — that is nerve, not point.
肚腹三里留
Zusanli is the second of the 四总穴 four command points, and its line in the quatrain is 肚腹三里留: for the belly and the abdomen, keep to Sanli. It is the he-sea point of the stomach channel, the place where the channel is said to enter deeply, and it is the single most used point in Chinese medicine — in acupuncture rooms, in army medicine, and on kitchen chairs at home.
If you would be at peace, Sanli should never be dry.
That saying is quoted everywhere, and it is almost always quoted without its original meaning. Keeping the point dry or not dry refers to scarring moxibustion — a blister deliberately kept open at Zusanli over long periods, a practice from a world with different ideas about wounds. Nobody should do that now, and we are not suggesting a modern version of it. What survived intact from that habit is the daily attention, and pressing with a thumb is how it survived.
慎
None of that is exotic. Long flights, long illnesses and long weeks at a desk are ordinary, and a swollen painful calf after any of them is worth an afternoon of somebody’s attention.
配伍
This is the point named for the empty and the heavy patterns rather than the hot ones. It appears in a reading of qi deficiency as the builder, in yang deficiency because warmth is generated by the digestion, and in dampness because damp is understood as a digestive matter before a fluid one. It appears in blood deficiency too, on the same reasoning: in this tradition blood is made from food.
Its classical partners are 中脘 Zhōngwǎn on the midline of the upper abdomen and 阴陵泉 Yīnlíngquán on the inside of the shin. For the restless, wakeful side of a picture the point is Neiguan instead, and for anything above the neck it is Hegu.
Read the general rules before you start, and the five patterns to see which of these is likely to be yours.
Questions
Because it is easy to find, hard to get badly wrong, and its classical associations are the broad everyday ones — digestion, tiredness, heaviness. It is a command point, it is the he-sea point of the stomach channel, and it has a thousand-year-old saying attached to it. In China it is pressed on buses.
Often, yes. A dull ache spreading down towards the ankle is the classical dé qì sensation and is taken as the sign that the point has been found. Sharp, electric or shooting pain into the foot is different: stop pressing, because that is nerve rather than point.
Not on our suggestion. Moxibustion involves heat close to the skin and carries a real burn risk, and the historical practice quoted in the classics deliberately kept a blister open at this point. If you want to learn moxa, learn it in person from someone licensed where you live who can watch you do 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 Zusanli 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.