Not in pregnancy.
Pairs with 太衝 for the “Four Gates”.
合谷 Hegu
“Joining Valley” · LI4
Hand Yangming · 4 of 20 · yuan-source
Where. On the back of the hand, on the mound between thumb and index finger when the thumb presses in.
For. Headache; pain of the face and teeth.
Press. Toward the index-finger bone, one minute, then the other hand.
Caution. Not in pregnancy.
合谷，在大指岐骨之間按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
配 · Pairs with
四關 The Four Gates
Four points pressed together: a classic pairing for tension and stress.
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
症 · Often paired with
Where Hegu Sits on the Hand
Turn the palm down and look at the back of the hand: two long bones — the metacarpals of the thumb and of the index finger — run side by side from the wrist toward the knuckles, and between them rises a wedge of flesh known in Chinese as the hukou, the tiger’s mouth. The dataset places Hegu on the dorsum of the hand, between the first and second metacarpal bones, at the midpoint of the radial side of the second metacarpal bone. Unpacked: the second metacarpal is the long bone seated inside the index finger, its radial side is the edge facing the thumb, and the midpoint is halfway along that stretch. The point therefore sits on the high ground of the web, not in the loose fold of skin itself.
The second half of the dataset location describes the classical shortcut. Lay the transverse crease of one thumb — the wrinkle where the thumb bends — across the web margin between the thumb and index finger of the other hand, and wherever the tip of that thumb comes to rest is the recorded location. Proportional measuring explains why so simple a gesture works: hands differ enormously in size and shape, and the width of a thumb scales with the hand it belongs to, so the crease-to-web method self-adjusts. A concert pianist and a warehouse worker locate the point by the same motion even though their hands barely resemble each other. Traditional location favours these built-in rulers precisely because they travel with the body.
What lies beneath the surface is worth knowing before any pressing begins. This territory belongs to the first dorsal interosseous muscle — the fan-shaped muscle that draws the index finger away from the middle finger. Spread your fingers and watch the web: the muscle bunches visibly under the skin, and its belly forms much of that mound. Compared with points on the thin-walled chest or the delicate neck, the geography here is forgiving: muscle padded over solid bone, far from lungs, organs, and major vessels. Forgiving terrain still asks for gentle hands, but it is part of why this point became a household name for self-care — the body offers few places where a fingertip lands so securely.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Begin by letting the hand tell you where the high ground is. Press the tip of the thumb against the tip of the index finger and squeeze them together: along the outer edge of the hand a fleshy mound rises, highest where the two digits meet. Relax the hand and let the mound settle. Its summit — the peak of that ridge, level with the middle of the index-finger metacarpal — is the neighborhood of Hegu. To confirm with the classical method, rest the bent crease of your free hand’s thumb across the web margin as described above and note where the tip falls. The two approaches should agree, give or take half a thumb-width.
Two quick confirmations help before pressing starts. First, touch lightly and compare hands: many people notice a faint, dull, spreading awareness right at the point and little sensation a finger-width away, and the two sides often differ slightly. Second, spread the fingers wide and release them — the muscle under the fingertip should tighten and soften, confirming you are resting on the interosseous belly rather than on bare tendon or the flat back of the hand. If everything feels silent everywhere, reseat the fingertip a few millimeters in any direction; the point is a small zone rather than a pinhead, and patient searching finds it faster than force ever could.
The usual mistakes are easy to name and easier to avoid. Searching too near the knuckle end of the index metacarpal carries you toward the neighboring point Sanjian (LI3), which lives in a narrow groove at the base of the index finger. Sliding too deep into the web itself sets you on thin, sensitive skin that bruises readily and was never the recorded location. Drifting toward the wrist flattens onto the shaft of the second metacarpal, where sensation is dull and uninformative. Whenever the search loses its way, return to the opening ritual — squeeze thumb to index, find the summit of the rising mound — and begin again calmly.
Reading the Name: Joining Valley
The two characters draw the landscape in miniature. He 合 means to join, to close, to come together — a character built from a roof and a mouth meeting beneath a single lid, an image of convergence. Gu 谷 means valley: the green corridor between ridges where water collects. Set the hand next to the name and the metaphor locks into place. The metacarpal bones of the thumb and the index stand in for the flanking hills, the web between them is the valley floor, and when the fingers press together the whole terrain closes and joins. Classical point names often work this way — gates, pools, streams, courtyards — turning anatomy into a short poem that carries practical instructions inside it.
The name also marks an office. Classical teaching assigns each of the twelve principal channels a yuan-source point — a place where the qi of that channel is understood to pool nearest the surface, something like the residence where a household keeps its seal. Hegu holds this post for the large intestine channel, and that rank goes far toward explaining the breadth of its traditional portfolio. Channel descriptions trace the large intestine pathway up the forearm and arm, over the shoulder, and onto the lower teeth, cheek, and face, so the hand-end point came to be treated as a control room for the whole route. Classical practice even grouped certain master points by body region, and the face and mouth were the region assigned to Hegu — which is why so many of its recorded uses cluster there.
Pinyin writes the name Hégu, with a rising second tone on he and a dipping third tone on gu — say it as if asking he? and answering gu. The hanzi pair 合谷 is compact enough to memorise at a glance, and the image repays attention every time the fingers meet the web: you are visiting a valley, entering where two hillsides join. Names in this tradition are rarely decoration. They compress location, function, and the old ways of thinking about the body into two syllables that a practitioner could carry across centuries without a diagram. Few points wear their own explanation as plainly as this one does.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The licensed record lists Hegu’s traditional applications generously: headache, red swollen eyes, nosebleed, toothache, deviation of the mouth and eye, deafness, pain of the limbs and internal organs, febrile disease with absence or excess of sweating, amenorrhea, lumbar sprain, stiff neck, wrist pain, and hiccups. Read as a group rather than a pharmacy list, three clusters emerge. One gathers the face and mouth — headache, eye complaints, nosebleed, toothache, facial deviation — matching the channel’s mapped course. A second gathers pains along the arm, hand, and back, consistent with a point sitting amid the hand’s working muscles. The third holds the systemic patterns: fever with disordered sweating and amenorrhea, which classical theory read through the movement of qi and blood.
Each cluster has its traditional logic. Because the channel surfaces on the face, classical practice reached for Hegu when heat, wind, or stagnation showed up there — red eyes, nosebleed, aching teeth. The sweating entry reflects a classical idea that this point helps regulate the exterior of the body, encouraging sweat where it failed to appear and settling it where it poured; texts described pairing Hegu with the point Fuliu as exactly this two-way adjustment. Amenorrhea connects to the same framework: when qi and blood were judged to move sluggishly, points that move them entered the discussion — and this traditional view of Hegu as a mover of qi and blood in the lower abdomen is precisely where the recorded pregnancy warning takes root. Tradition and caution share one origin.
It bears repeating plainly: all of the above are traditional uses recorded in a licensed dataset and classical literature, offered for cultural and historical understanding. They are not claims that pressing this point treats disease, and several entries translate poorly into modern life — sudden facial deviation, persistent nosebleed, or new hearing loss belong with medical professionals promptly, not with a pressure routine. Where modern research has touched acupressure at all, reviews suggest effects are modest and context-dependent, and evidence tied to any single point remains thin. Hold the tradition lightly and hold the safety rules firmly; the sections ahead put the rules first.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
Settle first: sit upright with shoulders released and rest the working hand on a table or thigh so it stays soft. Place the pad of your opposite thumb on the mound of the web and let your index finger curl underneath to meet it, so the point is held between cushioned pads rather than squeezed between fingernails. Begin with contact alone for a few slow breaths, then add small, unhurried circles or a steady, patient hold. Pressure should register as a pleasant, dull, spreading warmth — never as sharpness. A common home rhythm is one to three minutes per side, once or twice daily, with the exhale doing the work: ease in gently as the breath leaves, soften again on the inhale. Swap hands and treat both webs alike.
Quality outranks intensity here, as everywhere in self-care. Warm your hands before beginning — chilled fingers make the tissue guard — and keep fingernails trimmed so the pad, not the edge, meets the skin. No tools belong in this work: rollers, rings, and pointed devices concentrate force in ways fingertips were never meant to, and the recorded tradition assumes human touch. People who keep the habit usually anchor it to something already in the day — the commute’s end, tea steeping, a laptop closed for lunch — because regularity, not heroics, is what home practice actually asks for. Two quiet minutes daily beat twenty bruising minutes monthly.
Treat the session as a pause with a purpose rather than a repair job. Notice what changes across weeks: perhaps the jaw unclenches while you press, perhaps the shoulders drop a notch, perhaps nothing shifts except that you spent two minutes attending to your own tension 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 in the hope that persistence converts into benefit. When curiosity pulls toward force, return to gentleness, or set the practice down for the day.
Cautions and Safe Practice
Hegu carries the weightiest warning in this site’s catalogue, and it deserves its own headline. The licensed dataset cautions practitioners to treat the point with great care during pregnancy — or to avoid it altogether — recording that stimulating it markedly strengthens uterine contraction and that such stimulation during pregnancy may induce miscarriage. Home practice inherits a simple, absolute rule from that record: if you are pregnant, do not press this point at all, in any amount, however gentle. The same conservatism extends to anyone trying to become pregnant or uncertain whether they might be — consult a qualified practitioner before adding Hegu to any routine. No benefit suggested by tradition outweighs a risk written this plainly.
Other limits guard the rest of the map. Skip the point whenever the skin over the web is cut, abraded, blistered, or inflamed, and while any skin condition there is active. Pause during feverish illness, and after any recent hand injury, burn, fracture, or surgery until ordinary use of the hand is cleared. People living with bleeding disorders or taking blood-thinning medication do well to ask a clinician before adding pressure practices, because even gentle pressure can mark the skin. During any session, sharp, electric, or radiating sensation means stop at once and do not try again that day; numbness or a lingering ache afterward means the pressure exceeded what the tissue welcomed.
And the wider rule stands over everything. This page is educational; acupressure is self-care, not diagnosis or therapy. Seek prompt medical attention — not a longer pressing session — for sudden facial drooping or limb weakness, trouble speaking, a severe or unprecedented headache, headache with fever and a stiff neck, persistent nosebleed, new hearing loss, or a toothache that swells the face. Those are not indications; they are alarms. For everything less dramatic that persists beyond a couple of weeks, a licensed practitioner — medical or East Asian medical, as suits the complaint — is the right next step. Hegu’s valley is a fine place to visit; medicine is the road for anything that frightens you.
Hegu, Joining Valley, rests in the firm mound between thumb and index finger — perhaps the best-known spot on the hand in classical point maps. Tradition reached for it in headache, toothache, and complaints of the face and mouth, and modern self-care keeps it close at hand. This guide covers finding it, pressing it gently, and the one group of readers who must skip it entirely.
Cautions from the classical sources
- Use with caution, or not at all, in pregnancy; research shows needling here markedly strengthens uterine contractions, and stimulating it in pregnancy can bring on miscarriage.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Hegu without knowing anything about cun?
- Let the hand do the measuring. Squeeze the tip of your thumb against the tip of your index finger and watch the mound rise along the outer edge of the hand; the peak of that mound, level with the middle of the index-finger bone, is the neighborhood. Confirm with the classical shortcut: lay the bent crease of your other thumb across the web margin, and wherever the thumb tip settles is the recorded location. Cun measurements simply encode the same landmarks proportionally.
- Is pressing Hegu myself actually safe?
- For healthy adults who are not pregnant, gentle fingertip pressure on the surface is generally reasonable self-care: the point sits in thick muscle over solid bone, well away from lungs and organs, and home practice never approaches the techniques behind the recorded warnings. The absolute exception is pregnancy — the dataset’s caution there is explicit and covers every kind of stimulation of the point. Otherwise respect the stop signals: sharp pain, electric or radiating sensation, or discomfort that worsens all mean finish immediately.
- Why does tradition value Hegu so highly?
- Three reasons recur in the classical frame. It is the yuan-source point of the large intestine channel — the place that channel’s qi is said to pool nearest the surface. It commands the face and mouth, the region the channel’s mapped course reaches, so facial and dental complaints dominated its historic portfolio. And it sits in one of the body’s most accessible, sturdy locations, which made it a natural first choice for hand-based practice. Those are traditional frameworks for understanding, documented for context rather than offered as treatment claims.
- Who should leave Hegu alone completely?
- Pregnant readers, without exception — the recorded warning about uterine contraction and miscarriage risk governs every kind of stimulation, including the gentlest self-pressure. Take the same caution seriously when trying to conceive or when pregnancy is possible. Beyond that, skip the point over broken or inflamed skin, after recent hand injury or surgery, and during feverish illness, and ask a practitioner first if you live with a bleeding disorder or take blood-thinning medication. Families practising alongside young children should seek individual guidance beforehand.
- Can pressing Hegu replace seeing someone about my headaches?
- No. Self-acupressure is comfort practice, not diagnosis, and a headache carrying red flags — sudden onset unlike any before, fever with a stiff neck, weakness or speech trouble, a blow to the head, or one that simply worsens across days — needs prompt professional assessment. Think of daily self-care and clinical care as different floors of the same building: the quiet routine lives downstairs, and the consulting rooms upstairs open exactly when symptoms persist, escalate, 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, yuan-source theory, and channel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for LI4 Hegu — 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/li4/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/li4/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/li4/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "LI4",
"name": {
"en": "Hegu",
"gloss": "Joining Valley",
"zh-Hant": "合谷",
"zh-Hans": "合谷"
},
"channel": {
"id": "LI",
"order": 4,
"of": 20
},
"location": {
"text": "On the back of the hand, on the mound between thumb and index finger when the thumb presses in."
},
"for": [
"headache",
"pain of the face and teeth"
],
"press": {
"text": "Toward the index-finger bone, one minute, then the other hand.",
"seconds": 60,
"sides": "both"
},
"cautions": [
"Not in pregnancy."
],
"source": "Lingshu, chapter 2",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/li4",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}