Locating Acupuncture Points on the Hands Part Two: Muscles

This is for Chinese medicine students only, please pause and read. So we'll briefly introduce all of the intrinsic hand muscles. The good news is that you only need to learn the abductor's digiti minima and pollicis brevis, opponent's pollicis and the first dorsal interosseous muscle. The rest are just for fun. So in the hand the extrinsic muscles are to do with power and the intrinsic muscles are to do with precision. So we've got the phenar eminence and the hypophenar eminence in the palmar aspect. And we remember these like two loaves, they're like two loaves of bread sticking out. So the hypophenar eminence has to do with the little finger. So the loaf with the L is the lost one, the one that doesn't belong to the eminence which in this case is palmaris brevis which comes across here, inserts into the flexor retinaculum, it covers the carpal tunnel, comes across. And then we have the OAF muscles. So we have opponent's digiti minima that opposes movement. We have the A is abductor digiti minima that pushes the little finger out and the F is the flexor digiti minima that flexes the little finger. So the opponent's muscle sits deep and you can feel it but these three muscles are very hard to see the difference but you can kind of feel if you get the movements. So the opponent's is deep on the outside aspect running up here. We have the abductor digiti minima. So small intestine, small intestine two first of all is over the tendon of the abductor digiti minima. It's where the red and the white skin meet and it's at the flare of the base of the proximal phalanx. Small intestine three is also between the red and white skin. It's at the flare of the head of the fifth metacarpal. It's in between the abductor digiti minima which you can see this muscle if you push out the little finger you can see it come up and the bone so you get this nice seam in here. And then small intestine four is also in between the carpals on this abductor digiti minima. So small intestine two at the tendon, small intestine three and four in between the fifth metacarpal and the abductor digiti minima. And then part eight is in the belly of flexor digiti minima. If you went deeply enough you'd also get to flexor digiti minima from the small intestine points. Well I've seen our eminence, our loaf muscles. The L, the lost one, makes up the web of this finger here. It's called adductor pollicis and it pulls the thumb back into the index finger. It comes across a sail-shaped muscle that comes across from the second and third metatarsal inserts here. Our OAF, we've got opponent pollicis. It's just a thin strip, it runs deep again and there's a thin strip that you can feel in here and it opposes the thumb to the little finger. And then you've got the abductor pollicis brevis which abducts the fingers, remember abducts the thumb which is like glove pocket shape. And then finally at the top you've got the flexor pollicis brevis which flexes the thumb. Remember flexing the thumb brings the thumb down across the hand. So there's your three muscles and the lost one. So midway down the first metacarpal and in between the bone and this seam which is made by the muscle bulk which is opponent pollicis and adductor pollicis brevis is lung 10. And in this sail-shaped adductor pollicis is pericardium 8 which is at the flare of the head of the third metacarpal from the radial side. So on the dorsal aspect we've got some tendons to avoid. So if you make a cat's claw you've got the four tendons of extensor digitorum that form the clump. You've got extensor digitorum minimae extending the little finger. You've got extensor intersis that extends the index finger and extensor pollicis longus that extends the thumb. So on the dorsal aspect of the hand in between the metacarpals we've got the dorsal interossei muscles. So the dorsal in between the bones and we call them damps for short because the dorsal abduct the fingers. If you spread your fingers out that's what the damps are doing. So on the large intestine channel I've got large intestine 3 is at the flare of the head of the second MC and it's in between the first dorsal interosseus muscle, the first dab and the bone. And then large intestine 4 is at the flare of the base of the second MC and it's right in the belly of the dorsal interosseus muscle. Triple burner 2 is at the flare of the base of the proximal phalanx, the ring finger just on the corner and that's where the dab inserts. And then we come over to the other side triple burner 3 which is the flare of the head or in a notch just proximal to the flare of the head there's a little notch in there and that's in the dorsal interosseus muscle. So we'd also have yaotong shui points would be in the dorsal interosseus here and the long gen point at the flare of the head of this bone would be in the dorsal interosseus muscle as well. So to find the bashia points if we make a triangle from the height of the two MCP joints and the crease where the crease meets forms a little triangle we go right into the centre of that triangle that's the bashia point, one for each finger and they go into the interosseus muscles as well. The one on the thumb starts just under the and up into the interosseus muscle from here where the edge of the web is. Underneath the dorsal interosseus muscle we've got the palmar interosseus muscles and the mnemonic for that is pats so the palmar ones add up the fingers if you squeeze the fingers together and you can't really feel them and underneath them you've got the lumbricals and the lumbricals which means worms travel from the palmar side through into the dorsal side and they make an L-shaped hand so if you imagine that these tendons are flexing to here and extending here so they're making an L-shaped hand and we don't need those muscles for anything but points like large intestine 3, heart 8, pericardium 8, bashia are superficial to these muscles.