絡卻 Luoque
“The Net That Steps Back” · BL8
Foot Taiyang · 8 of 67
Where. Just behind the crown, two finger-widths behind BL7 and two finger-widths out from the centre line.
For. Dizziness; ringing in the ears; blurred vision.
Press. Small circles with two fingertips, about a minute each side.
絡卻，一名強陽，一名腦蓋，在通天後一寸三分按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
Where Luoque Sits on the Dome of the Head
The licensed dataset places Luoque on the head, five and a half cun above the midpoint of the anterior hairline and one and a half cun lateral to it. Unpacked, that is two coordinates rather than one. The vertical coordinate climbs from the centre of the front hairline straight up the scalp. The horizontal coordinate shifts that climb onto a parallel track set one and a half cun to the side of the head’s centre seam — a distance traditionally approximated by the index and middle fingers pressed together at their base. A cun itself is the proportional unit of Chinese point-location, measured from the person rather than from a ruler, with the width of your own thumb at the knuckle serving as the classic hand-sized stand-in for one cun. Two measurements later, the fingertip rests high on the side-top of the skull, well clear of both hairline and ear.
It helps to know how far up five and a half cun really is. Classical measuring tables divide the span from the front hairline to the back hairline into twelve equal parts, so five and a half cun lands a shade short of halfway along the covered scalp — high on the dome, on the smooth slope that rises toward the crown without quite reaching its summit. What the fingertips meet here is gentle terrain. Scalp layers — skin, firm connective tissue, and the broad tendon-like cap that lets the whole covering glide minutely over what lies beneath — stretch across solid, unyielding skull. Everything delicate rests far out of reach behind that bony vault. Pressure registers as a clean push against unmoving bone, quite different from the springy give of points over muscle, and light touch reads this terrain perfectly; force adds nothing but soreness. Many heads carry a hair whorl somewhere nearby, though its position varies widely, so treat the whorl as a hint rather than a landmark.
The wider map explains why this spot earned its station. The bladder channel — the longest of the classical pathways, running from the inner eye over the head and down the back to the little toe, with sixty-seven recorded points — crosses the scalp along exactly this kind of parallel track. Its recorded head-points climb a tidy ladder set one and a half cun out from the midline: Chengguang (BL6) at two and a half cun above the hairline, Tongtian (BL7) at four, and Luoque (BL8) at five and a half — each rung a thumb-and-a-half higher than the last. Past Luoque the mapped course leaves the lateral line for the back of the head, where Yuzhen (BL9) waits behind, recorded on a slightly narrower line, before descending to the nape. Luoque therefore reads as the top landing of that climb — and like nearly every head point, it comes mirrored, one on each side of the seam.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Sit upright on a firm chair with both feet down and shoulders released, and warm your hands if they run cold; a mirror helps at first, though fingertips soon outrank eyes here. Begin by finding the centre seam: rest a finger at the middle of the front hairline — where the forehead meets hair, directly above the nose — and draw it slowly back over the crown, tracing the midline you can feel better than see. Next mark the offset: lay your index and middle fingers side by side against the seam at hairline height; their combined width is the traditional stand-in for one and a half cun. Keeping that sideways gap, climb: pace up the scalp in thumb-widths from the hairline, counting five and a half, and let the fingertip settle on the high dome. Repeat the whole search on the other side so both members of the pair receive the same care.
A few quiet confirmations help before pressing begins. Touch feather-light at the spot you found, then a thumb-width away in any direction, and compare: many people notice a faint dull fullness or mild tenderness at the true point and considerably less elsewhere, and the two sides often differ slightly. Recheck the count — from the hairline’s midpoint the site should sit five and a half thumb-widths up, comfortably high rather than near the hair. Because the arms reach overhead here, brace your elbow on a table edge or chair arm for steadiness, and part thick hair gently rather than pressing through it, using pads, never nails. Slow breathing changes how vividly the scalp reports touch, so pause and let one breath move beneath still fingertips before judging what you feel.
Three slips account for most misses. Drifting off the parallel track is the first: the seam is easy to lose on a hairy scalp, so re-anchor against it whenever the search wanders. Landing too low is the second — the ladder’s rhythm matters, since Tongtian sits a thumb-and-a-half below on the same line, while the next recorded station after Luoque lies behind at the back of the head, not above it; if your fingertip still feels hairline territory, recount from the start. Hunting too hard is the third: firm pressing tenses the scalp, dulls sensation, and turns a calm search into a wrestling match. Losing track costs nothing at all — simply return to the hairline midpoint and climb again, slowly. Most people land the point confidently within a try or two.
Reading the Name: The Net That Steps Back
The two characters draw the image in miniature. Luo 絡 belongs to the silk family of characters — its left side is the thread radical — and its meanings gather around weaving: a fine net, a web, the winding of strands around and through one another, the act of connecting thing to thing. In channel vocabulary the same character names the collaterals, the fine branching webs the classics describe spreading outward from the main channels, and it appears in jingluo, the very word for meridian. Que 卻 speaks of stepping back: to withdraw, recede, retire, or decline. The character still lives in everyday speech — in wangque 忘卻, to forget, literally to let something slip away — and as the pivot word for yet or however. Set side by side, the pair suggests a netting that draws back: the retreating web.
Readers of the tradition have taken that pairing in more than one direction, and honesty requires presenting such readings as interpretation rather than citation. One natural reading looks at the geography: the channel’s lateral ladder finishes its recorded climb at this point before the mapped course passes backward toward the back of the head, so a name speaking of retreat suits a station where ascent pauses and the path turns. Another notices how well netting imagery fits scalp country, laced as it visibly is with fine vessels and nerves threading just beneath the skin. It is also worth recording what the registry does not say: Luoque carries no special title — no mu, yuan, or crossing-point office. It is a plain station of the bladder channel, distinguished not by rank but by its lofty address and the breadth of uses gathered under it.
Pinyin writes the name Luòquè, and both syllables speak with the same voice: each carries the falling fourth tone, delivered with a clean downward drop, so the name sounds firm and clipped — a decision rather than a question. The dictionary keeps matters simple: luo takes its falling tone everywhere except one household word for a knotted thread bag, and que holds its falling tone throughout. The hanzi pair 絡卻 is compact enough to memorise at a glance. Like the gates, valleys, courtyards, and storehouses scattered across the chart, the name compresses observation into an image that does real work — it tells you the tradition saw this high station as a place where climbing nets settle back, and it hands you the geography of the whole neighbourhood in two syllables.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The licensed record lists Luoque’s traditional applications as: dizziness, epilepsy, mania, convulsions, blurred vision, tinnitus, and rhinitis. Read as a group, two families emerge. The first gathers sudden stirrings — epilepsy, mania, convulsions, with dizziness standing at their milder edge. Classical medicine explained abrupt, involuntary movement through the behaviour of wind, an image for conditions that arrive without warning, shake what should be steady, and leave as suddenly as they came; the head, read as the seat of clarity where the channels converge, was the natural territory for such discussions, and a high station belonged in them. Dizziness bridged everyday experience and grave illness on the old maps much as it does now: sometimes a passing dimness, sometimes the herald of something serious requiring more than any point could offer.
The second family gathers the sense-orifices: blurred vision, tinnitus, rhinitis — clouded seeing, ringing ears, a troubled nose. The bladder channel begins at the inner corner of the eye and courses up and over the head, so classical practice had a ready route-map linking this stretch of scalp to the openings of the face; head-orifice complaints were traditionally gathered at head stations along the channel’s climb. Rhinitis translates into today’s vocabulary as nasal congestion and discharge of the kind allergy and colds bring. The graver entries deserve a plain sentence each: epilepsy and convulsions belong to emergency medicine the moment they appear; mania, in its historic sense of severe mental upheaval, belongs to psychiatric care; and new blurred vision, new tinnitus, or new dizziness always deserve proper assessment before anyone reaches for a wellness routine. Those are not indications. They are alarms.
It bears repeating plainly: all of the above are traditional uses recorded in a licensed dataset and classical literature, offered here for cultural and historical understanding. They are not claims that pressing this point treats disease. Where modern research has touched self-applied pressure at all, reviews suggest effects are modest and context-dependent, and evidence tied to any single point remains thin. A scalp station reached for in the old records when minds and senses wavered is best received today the way one receives any heirloom: with interest, with respect for the people who kept it, and without confusing it with a prescription. Hold the tradition lightly, and hold the safety rules firmly.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
With the point located, settle in: seated, spine tall but unforced, shoulders heavy. Because the arms must reach overhead here, give them support — rest your elbows on a table edge, desk, or the arms of a chair so the hands arrive rested rather than strained. Warm your hands, part the hair gently, and choose your contact: the pads of the index and middle fingers pressed together cover the neighbourhood neatly. Begin with contact alone for a few slow breaths, then add small, unhurried circles, letting the scalp glide minutely over the bone beneath. Pressure should register as pleasant dullness or spreading warmth, never sharpness. A common home rhythm is one to three minutes per side, once or twice daily, matched where possible to long exhales so each circle rides the breath out; finish by giving the other side its turn.
Quality outranks duration here even more than at fleshy points. The scalp reports honestly: grinding or jabbing produces only soreness, while light, patient, regularly repeated contact is the entire art. No tools belong in this work — rollers, rings, and pointed devices concentrate force in ways fingertips were never meant to — and fingernails stay trimmed so the pad, not the edge, meets the skin. Choose a quiet corner over a screen and let the session double as a thinking-of-nothing pause: inhale through the nose with the fingers still, press gently on the long exhale, and let the minute be genuinely quiet. People who keep such routines usually anchor them to existing habits — after morning washing, during the evening wind-down — because consistency, not intensity, is what home practice asks for.
Treat the minutes as a small ceremony of attention rather than a treatment session. Across weeks you may notice the scalp feels less tight, that a midday pause has quietly appeared in your routine, or simply that you spent ninety seconds attending to your own head instead of scrolling past it. Every one of those outcomes fits the honest scope of self-acupressure. What does not fit is escalation — pressing harder, longer, or deeper to force a result, or continuing through pain hoping persistence converts into benefit. When curiosity pulls that way, return to gentleness or set the practice down for the day. The dome rewards patience and keeps no score; the practice exists to serve your day, not to rule it.
Cautions and Safe Practice
An honest note comes first: the licensed dataset records no cautions for this entry, and this module echoes that empty record exactly. An absence of printed warnings is not an invitation to force — it reflects only what the source documents contain, nothing more. The high dome deserves the same respect as any point on the map, perhaps a shade more for how sensitive scalps can be. All self-care here stays strictly on the surface: skin and scalp layers resting on solid bone, nothing directed inward, nothing beyond the natural weight of a fingertip. Within that boundary, generations of home practice have found the crown country perfectly companionable.
The practical rules follow simply. Use finger pads only — never nails, knuckles, elbows, or tools. Skip the point over broken skin, rashes, fresh scars, scabs, or an irritated scalp, and pause the practice entirely during a feverish illness. After any significant bang to the head, and after any surgery involving the head or scalp, wait for a clinician to clear ordinary activity before resuming. Sharp, electric, or radiating sensation means stop at once and do not try again that day; lingering soreness afterward means the pressure exceeded what the tissue welcomed. Pregnant readers, and anyone living with a condition affecting the brain or nervous system, should consult a qualified practitioner before adding any new point practice to the week — a sensible precaution, given how much trust the old records placed in head points.
And the wider rule stands over everything: this page is educational, and acupressure is self-care, not diagnosis or therapy. Seek prompt medical attention — not a longer pressing session — for a sudden severe headache unlike any before it, headache after a blow to the head, headache with fever and a stiff neck, any seizure or fainting spell, new blurred vision or new ringing in the ears, dizziness accompanied by slurred speech, limb weakness, or facial drooping, or any symptom that frightens you. Persistent headaches, ongoing dizziness, or ear-ringing that will not settle belong with a licensed practitioner, medical or East Asian medical as suits the complaint. The imagery of a retreating net is lovely, but the safest gift Luoque offers most people is quieter: a better acquaintance with their own head, treated kindly.
Luoque — a name joining fine netting with a step backward — stands high on the dome of the head, five and a half cun above the front hairline and one and a half cun beside the centre seam. Tradition reached here amid dizziness and stirred spirits, clouded sight, and ringing ears. This guide covers finding it by touch and pressing it gently.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Luoque without knowing anything about cun?
- Use your own hand as the ruler. Find the middle of the front hairline, trace the centre seam back over the crown, then set your index and middle fingers side by side against the seam — their combined width stands in for one and a half cun. From there, pace up the scalp in thumb-widths, counting five and a half, and settle on the high dome. Cun measurements simply encode that landmark sequence in proportional language; the hand performs it without needing the vocabulary.
- Is pressing the top of my own head actually safe?
- Gentle fingertip contact on an intact scalp is generally reasonable self-care for healthy adults: the fingers engage skin and scalp layers resting on solid bone, far short of anything delicate. The licensed record lists no cautions for this entry, though an absence of printed warnings never licenses force — lightness remains the rule everywhere on the map. Respect the stop signals: sharp pain, electric or radiating sensation, or discomfort that worsens all mean finish immediately, and anything felt as alarming rather than merely dull deserves a professional opinion.
- What did classical practice use Luoque for?
- The traditional record lists dizziness, epilepsy, mania, convulsions, blurred vision, tinnitus, and rhinitis. Classical teaching grouped sudden stirring conditions under patterns of wind and treated the head as the terrain where clarity held court, so a lofty scalp station entered those discussions; the channel’s origin at the inner eye gave it a ready link to the face’s openings. These are traditional frameworks for understanding the body, documented for cultural context — not evidence-backed treatment claims — and the serious entries among them belong wholly to modern medicine today.
- Why would a point be named after a net stepping back?
- The characters invite the picture. Luo means fine netting and gives its name to the collaterals — the branching webs described spreading from the main channels — while que means to step back or withdraw. Readers of the tradition have connected the pairing with this stretch of the map, where the channel’s recorded climb beside the midline tops out before passing backward toward the back of the head. Treat such readings as interpretation handed down rather than quotation; the name repays them as poetry that happens to point at real geography.
- Can acupressure at Luoque replace seeing a doctor about dizziness or ringing ears?
- No. Self-acupressure is a comfort practice, not a diagnostic tool. Dizziness or ear-ringing carrying red flags — a first or unexpected seizure, fainting, sudden changes in hearing or sight, dizziness with slurred speech, weakness, or facial drooping — needs prompt professional assessment, and symptoms persisting beyond a couple of weeks deserve one too. Think of the two as different floors of the same building: daily self-care lives downstairs, and the consulting room upstairs opens whenever symptoms persist, worsen, or frighten you. Neither floor substitutes for the other.
Sources
- 01WHO Standard Acupuncture Point Locations in the Western Pacific Region (2008), World Health Organization — nomenclature conventions.
- 02A Manual of Acupuncture, Peter Deadman, Mazin Al-Khafaji and Kevin Baker — point-name tradition and channel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for BL8 Luoque — location, point class, actions, and caution record.
Last reviewed
牌記This leaf, for machines
Old books ended with a colophon saying who printed them. Every leaf here carries the same facts as structured data for agents and search, with no layout in the way.
- GET /en/points/bl8/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/bl8/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/bl8/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "BL8",
"name": {
"en": "Luoque",
"gloss": "The Net That Steps Back",
"zh-Hant": "絡卻",
"zh-Hans": "络却"
},
"channel": {
"id": "BL",
"order": 8,
"of": 67
},
"location": {
"text": "Just behind the crown, two finger-widths behind BL7 and two finger-widths out from the centre line."
},
"for": [
"dizziness",
"ringing in the ears",
"blurred vision"
],
"press": {
"text": "Small circles with two fingertips, about a minute each side.",
"seconds": 60,
"sides": "both"
},
"cautions": [],
"source": "Zhenjiu Jiayi Jing, book 3",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/bl8",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}