I have often been asked why I choose a particular point or point combination, and have always found this difficult to answer, except in very few cases. It is easy to explain the points chosen to clear a block of one kind or other, because pulse readings require them. Apart from these, though, we are left with a whole raft of points which depend entirely upon a practitioner's choice. This is a much more esoteric area of point selection, about which much is written but very little, I feel, is really understood. I and others living in this country may have been lucky to learn from more experienced practitioners, particularly in my case from JR Worsley, but others in other countries have not been so fortunate. And now, as I have often lamented, there are so few good five element acupuncturists anywhere around the world that we have in some respect to wind the clock back to a time when a five element practitioner was a kind of pioneer, each of us working out our own principles of point selection.
I have a precious, but surprisingly small repertoire of points whose function I heard JR Worsley describe as he selected them for patients we brought to see him. I treasure these, and use them probably with greater confidence than I do points that I have myself accumulated over the years. In the majority of cases, though, JR would recommend points without saying anything more, leaving it to us to work out our own explanations for why he was choosing these particular points for this particular patient. Some of us students found this absence of explanation difficult to accept, but I did not, always regarding five element practice as being based on a question of "feel" rather than on logic. I realise now how fortunate I was that I emerged from our training without feeling confused about how to select points.
Basically the rules we used were very simple. The main emphasis was on points of the element we had diagnosed, particularly its command points, above all source points. We would occasionally add what we now call a spirit point, such as Bl (III) 38 (43) or CV (Ren Mai) 8, but often not even these. Looking back this made for very simple, but highly effective treatment. I can't remember any of the confusion which now seems to hover around point selection. This may partly be the result of the many books which have appeared since I graduated, listing points and claiming to explain their individual function. This is often on very flimsy evidence and with even flimsier proof that the author has gained his/her understanding of a point's function from good clinical practice.
It demands much of practitioners to accept that they must learn to rely on their own subjective impressions rather than open a book to search for points to select. I would recommend that they should instead spend the time looking at their patients, and training their senses to see, hear, smell and feel, and use this information to guide them towards an element. As I always say, it is far better to think elements than points.
