Favorite Points: Jeff from Oakland on Luo Zhen

Luo Zhen (A.K.A.: Dropped Pillow)

At SAP, we’ve got a good track record with alleviating neck pain. It can take a few visits, but people often leave without a pain in the neck. All of us have our favorite tricks that we use for neck issues and Luo Zhen is one of those favorite points. It is located on the back of the hand in the small divot behind the knuckles of the index and middle fingers. 

Luo Zhen roughly translates as “Dropped Pillow” or some texts will translate it as “Stiff Neck.” It brings to my mind the image of a deep sleep when the pillow drops in the night. Nobody noticed! So, y’all woke up with a crick in your neck and the pillow, sadly, on the ground. I’ve had many conversations with an old friend of mine (we’re the same age) about the aches and pains that we wake up with. I tell him that I have to do about 20 minutes of yoga to be ready for my day. If our pillow dropped, we’d both be in trouble.

Over the years, I’ve treated a lot of stress in the clinic (as well as my own). Its cost on our bodies manifests in different ways. Sometimes it’s physical tension that we hold; other times it’s mental: insomnia, worry and other emotional manifestations. My acupuncture experience is that stress, when it is tension that is held in the physical body, is held somewhere along the shao yang meridian. It sounds very esoteric, especially since the shao yang meridian haphazardly winds around the body. In school, I used to think that it was the grab bag of meridians. There were a bunch of leftover points and someone played connect the dots. But it’s real! Someone was stressed out, and in pain, and this is probably where it hurt! That’s how they connected the dots! 

Luo Zhen isn’t on any particular meridian. It’s classified as an extra point. But when you see it on the hand, it often lines up with the rest of the shao yang meridian on the arm. It is like a dagger pointed to the local points that we often use right on the neck. The next time you are in the clinic you might see it there, inviting the pain to drop, just like the pillow did.

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