Bai Chong Wo Hundred Insect Burrow

What does Bai Chong Wo do?

Bai Chong Wo is a skin point, and specifically an itch point — that is what the whole of its documented use amounts to. It is an extra point, belonging to no channel, so it carries no channel-theory action; what the reference literature records is a point on the inner thigh above the knee used for itching rashes and eruptions, and, more distantly, for intestinal worms. Its name says the same thing: "Hundred Insect Burrow" is a description of skin that crawls and itches as though a hundred insects were beneath it.

• Relieves itching — the defining documented use, and the reason the point has survived in the repertoire at all. Where the presenting complaint is itch rather than rash, this is the point the extra-point literature reaches for.
• Used for itchy eruptions of the skin — the indications carried in Sacred Lotus sources & references name rubella and eczema, and the wider reference literature adds hives and other itchy rashes. Modern clinical work has used it for the itch of kidney failure (PMID 41921455).
• Used for intestinal parasites — recorded in the reference literature and carried in our own indication record as gastrointestinal parasitic disease. This is the older of its two documented applications and the one that most obviously connects to the "insects" in the name; it is rarely the reason the point is chosen today.
• Located by tenderness — the reference literature describes the point as sitting in a tender depression on the muscle bulge above the inner knee, which means it is found by pressing rather than only by measuring.

A correction worth stating plainly. Our own earlier record described Bai Chong Wo as "cooling the Blood and clearing Heat", "expelling Wind and stopping itching" and "draining Dampness from the skin". Those are channel and pattern-theory phrases, and Bai Chong Wo lies on no channel — it has no five-shu, yuan, luo, xi-cleft, back-shu or front-mu classification, and there is no channel through it whose blood could be cooled. The phrases were almost certainly inherited from its neighbour rather than recorded for it. The two points that genuinely carry that reasoning are both held here and are worth knowing precisely: SP-10 Xue Hai, "Sea of Blood", one cun below this point on the same muscle bulge, a point of the Spleen channel whose recorded actions are to cool and invigorate the blood, and which approaches a rash through the blood; and LI-11 Qu Chi, the He-Sea and Earth point of the Large Intestine channel, the tradition's principal heat-clearing point, whose recorded actions combine clearing heat, cooling blood, eliminating wind, draining damp and stopping itching, and which approaches a rash through heat. Our SP-10 record sets out that pairing in full and names Bai Chong Wo as its dermatological specialisation. Nothing is lost by the correction: the pattern reasoning is real and belongs one cun down the thigh, and knowing that is more useful than attributing it here.

Source: Sacred Lotus sources & references (existing action and indication record, corrected as described; SP-10 and LI-11 records); Deadman & Al-Khafaji, A Manual of Acupuncture, extra points (p. 582); Chinese Acupuncture & Moxibustion (p. 252); PubMed PMID 41921455 — verified resolvable and checked for retraction status before citation; cross-referenced against multiple online sources.

What is Bai Chong Wo used for?

Bai Chong Wo is used for itching, and for the skin conditions in which itching is the main complaint. The indications carried in Sacred Lotus sources & references are rubella, eczema and gastrointestinal parasitic disease, and the wider reference literature adds the other itchy eruptions. The list is short and it should stay short — this is a narrowly specialised point, not a general one.

• Itching of the skin, of any cause — the core indication
• Eczema and itchy dermatitis
• Urticaria (hives) and rubella-type rashes
• Itchy eruptions with a raised, blotchy or wheal-like appearance
• Itching of the lower limbs and the inner thigh in particular, the point being local to that region
• Itch of chronic kidney failure, in modern clinical work (PMID 41921455)
• Intestinal parasites and worm infestation, the older documented application
• Local pain and tenderness of the inner thigh above the knee

What it is not used for. The reference literature does not record Bai Chong Wo for skin conditions that do not itch, for internal organ disorders, or for anything above the waist. Where an eruption is hot, acute, feverish or spread across the whole body, the point that carries that reasoning is LI-11 Qu Chi; where it is chronic, dry, dark or tied to the menstrual cycle, it is SP-10 Xue Hai; where the reasoning is about blood in general, it is BL-17 Ge Shu, the influential point of blood. All three are held in Sacred Lotus sources & references, and in practice Bai Chong Wo is added to them rather than used instead of them.

Source: Sacred Lotus sources & references (existing indication record; SP-10, LI-11 and BL-17 records); Deadman & Al-Khafaji, A Manual of Acupuncture, extra points (p. 582); Chinese Acupuncture & Moxibustion (p. 252); PubMed PMID 41921455 — verified resolvable and checked for retraction status before citation; cross-referenced against multiple online sources.

Where is Bai Chong Wo, and how does it relate to SP-10 Xue Hai?

Bai Chong Wo sits one cun directly above SP-10 Xue Hai, on the same bulge of muscle above the inner knee, and the two are used together and compared constantly. In our own words: with the knee bent, a rounded mass of muscle stands out on the inner side of the thigh just above the kneecap. SP-10 sits on that bulge two cun above the top edge of the kneecap; Bai Chong Wo sits on the same bulge three cun above it, in a tender depression a finger's breadth higher. That one cun is the whole geographical difference between them.

The relationship is worth stating precisely because the two points are so easily conflated, and because our own SP-10 record already describes it from the other side — it names Bai Chong Wo as the relative that "lies one cun higher on the same muscle bulge and shares almost the whole of SP-10's skin territory", and notes that practitioners frequently use them together or interchangeably for itching. Read from this side, the distinction is:

• SP-10 is a channel point; Bai Chong Wo is not. SP-10 belongs to the Spleen channel and carries the full pattern reasoning that goes with it. Bai Chong Wo belongs to no channel and carries documented clinical use only.
• SP-10 is the broader point; Bai Chong Wo is the narrower. SP-10 is used for menstrual disorders and for blood problems generally as well as for the skin. Bai Chong Wo is used for the skin, and mostly for the itch.
• Bai Chong Wo is the more specialised choice where itch dominates. That is the practical rule most sources arrive at, and it is why the two so often appear in the same prescription rather than as alternatives.

Which points is Bai Chong Wo combined with?

• With SP-10 Xue Hai — the default pairing, one cun below on the same muscle. Both are held here.
• With LI-11 Qu Chi — the standard skin pairing in Chinese medicine, on the arm rather than the leg. Our SP-10 record sets out the LI-11 comparison in full: LI-11 approaches an eruption through heat, SP-10 through blood, and most protocols use both. A double-blind randomised trial of laser acupuncture used exactly the trio LI-11, SP-10 and Bai Chong Wo (PMID 41921455).
• With BL-17 Ge Shu — the influential point of blood, on the back at the level of the diaphragm, added where the reasoning is about blood rather than about the skin surface.
• With SP-06 San Yin Jiao — the meeting point of the three leg yin channels, above the inner ankle; the standard addition where a chronic skin condition is attributed to depletion.
• With SP-09 Yin Ling Quan — below the inner knee, the principal point for resolving damp, added where an eruption is weeping or blistered.
• With local and Ashi points — for itching confined to one region, alongside the distal points above.

How is Bai Chong Wo used in practice?

It is a distal point used bilaterally, found by pressing for the tender spot rather than measured off alone, and it belongs to the small group of points that a practitioner reaches for when a patient's dominant complaint is the sensation of itching rather than the appearance of the rash. Beyond needling, the reference literature records the point being used with moxibustion, and modern clinical work has applied laser stimulation to it — one advantage of a point on the thigh being that it is reachable without undressing the affected skin.

Source: Sacred Lotus sources & references (existing use record and location; SP-06, SP-09, SP-10, LI-11 and BL-17 records, and the Bai Chong Wo cross-reference carried in our own SP-10 record); Deadman & Al-Khafaji, A Manual of Acupuncture, extra points (p. 582) and SP-10 (p. 190); Chinese Acupuncture & Moxibustion (p. 252); PubMed PMID 41921455 — verified resolvable and checked for retraction status before citation; cross-referenced against multiple online sources.

Where is Bai Chong Wo located?

• A Manual of Acupuncture (p. 582): 3 cun proximal to the superior border of the patella, in a tender depression on the bulge of the vastus medialis muscle.

How is Bai Chong Wo needled in the textbooks?

Reference record only — this describes what the standard texts document, not instruction for a reader. Sacred Lotus sources & references record perpendicular or oblique insertion of 1 to 1.5 cun at Bai Chong Wo. The tissue there is thick muscle — the bulge of the vastus medialis, the innermost of the four quadriceps muscles — which is why the recorded depth is greater here than at points over thin cover. Moxibustion is recorded as applicable.

• Angle documented: perpendicular, or oblique.
• Depth documented: approximately 1 to 1.5 cun.
• Location by palpation: the reference literature specifies a tender depression, so the point is confirmed by pressure before anything else.
• Moxibustion: recorded as applicable.
• Laser stimulation: used in place of needling in published clinical work at this point (PMID 41921455).

What are the safety considerations at Bai Chong Wo?

Bai Chong Wo carries none of the hazard that governs points over the chest, the upper back or the abdomen — there is no body cavity, no lung and no internal organ anywhere beneath it. What bounds it is the vascular and nervous anatomy of the inner thigh, and our own record has carried that caution for some time. It is set out here as safety reference rather than as guidance for performing anything.

• What our own record documents. Sacred Lotus sources & references note that the point overlies superficial cutaneous branches of the femoral nerve and the great saphenous vein, with the femoral artery and vein and the main femoral nerve trunk deeper still, and that deep or aggressive insertion is avoided — particularly in people taking anticoagulant medication.
• Why the inner distal thigh in particular. The muscle bulge on which this point sits forms one wall of the adductor canal, the tunnel in the lower third of the thigh through which the femoral artery and vein pass on their way to the back of the knee, accompanied by the saphenous nerve. That is the anatomical reason the medial thigh is treated more carefully than the front or the outer side, and the reason the recorded depth is bounded.
• Bruising is the realistic event, not injury. Bleeding, bruising and haematoma at the needle site are the most frequently reported acupuncture adverse events overall, and a vascular region such as this is where they occur; a 2024 review of the safety literature places them among the common minor events and reserves the serious categories for organ injury, nerve injury and infection (Am J Chin Med 2024;52(6):1555–1587, PMID 39460372).
• Broken or inflamed skin. Because this is a point used for eruptions, the skin over it may itself be affected. The standard reference practice is that needles are not inserted through broken, weeping or actively infected skin.
• Risk in proportion. A meta-analysis of prospective clinical studies estimated serious acupuncture-related adverse events at approximately 1 per 10,000 patients and about 8 per million treatments, with roughly half of all recorded events being bleeding, pain or flare at the needle site (Bäumler P et al., BMJ Open 2021;11:e045961, PMID 34489268). The randomised trial of laser stimulation at this point reported no adverse events or treatment-related discomfort at all (PMID 41921455) — though laser involves no needle, so that is a limited comparison.

Standard clean-needle practice applies. Acupuncture is performed by qualified, licensed practitioners; this record documents the literature and is not a technique guide.

Source: Sacred Lotus sources & references (existing needling record and the anatomical caution previously carried in our notes); Deadman & Al-Khafaji, A Manual of Acupuncture, extra points (p. 582); Chinese Acupuncture & Moxibustion (p. 252); PubMed PMID 39460372, 34489268, 41921455 — each verified resolvable and checked for retraction status before citation.

What does the name Bai Chong Wo mean?

Bai Chong Wo means "Hundred Insect Burrow" — bai, a hundred; chong, insects or worms; wo, a nest, den or burrow. It is one of the most vivid names in the point repertoire and it is a description of a symptom rather than of a location: skin that itches as though a hundred insects were burrowing beneath it. That single image accounts for both of the point's documented applications, because chong in classical Chinese covers worms as well as insects, and the point is recorded both for the crawling itch of the skin and for intestinal parasites. Which of those two came first is not something the sources settle, and we do not guess. The point carries the modern code EX-LE 3 ("extra point, lower extremity, number 3") and the older code M-LE-34.

Is Bai Chong Wo a channel point?

No. Bai Chong Wo is an extra point. Extra points sit outside the fourteen channels: they were recorded for an observed clinical effect rather than derived from channel theory, so they carry no five-shu, yuan, luo, xi-cleft, back-shu or front-mu classification. That is why our record shows no channel and no point categories, and why the actions above are framed as documented uses rather than as pattern mechanics. Its position immediately above SP-10 on the Spleen channel makes the distinction easy to lose — a point one cun from a channel point is still not on the channel — and that proximity is the likeliest source of the blood-cooling language that had attached itself to our earlier record.

How does Bai Chong Wo compare with SP-10 Xue Hai and LI-11 Qu Chi?

These three are the skin cluster of Chinese medicine, and they divide the work between them. LI-11 Qu Chi, at the outer end of the elbow crease, is the heat point: the He-Sea and Earth point of the Large Intestine channel and the tradition's principal point for clearing heat, chosen where an eruption is acute, red, hot and systemic. SP-10 Xue Hai, "Sea of Blood", on the muscle above the inner knee, is the blood point: it cools and moves blood and treats the itch as a consequence of wind stirring in heated blood, chosen where the presentation is chronic, dry, dark or tied to the menstrual cycle. Bai Chong Wo, one cun above SP-10 on the same muscle, is the itch point: no channel, no pattern of its own, and a documented use that narrows almost entirely to the sensation itself. Our own SP-10 record describes it in exactly those terms — as essentially SP-10's dermatological specialisation. In practice all three commonly appear together, and a published double-blind trial used precisely that trio.

Is there research on Bai Chong Wo?

There is very little, but unusually for an extra point, what exists is genuinely point-relevant rather than borrowed from a large protocol. Two studies name it directly.

• A double-blind randomised sham-controlled trial of laser acupuncture including this point. Sixty patients on maintenance haemodialysis with uraemic pruritus — the persistent, distressing itch of kidney failure, which responds poorly to conventional treatment — were randomised one-to-one to laser acupuncture or sham laser, three times weekly for four weeks. Stimulation was applied at three points only: Qu Chi LI-11, Xue Hai SP-10 and Baichongwo (EX-LE3). The laser group improved significantly on the 5-D itch scale (mean difference −6.9; 95% confidence interval −8.4 to −5.4; p < 0.001; effect size 1.12) and on the Dermatology Life Quality Index, with no adverse events recorded (Complement Ther Clin Pract 2026;63:102054, PMID 41921455, DOI 10.1016/j.ctcp.2026.102054). Two honest qualifications: the trial tested a three-point protocol rather than this point alone, and laser stimulation is not needling. Even so, a blinded sham-controlled trial of a three-point protocol of which this is one third is better point-specific evidence than most extra points can show.
• An experimental ranking of extra points. A study in female rats measured the electrical activity of gonadotropin-releasing hormone neurons in the hypothalamus during stimulation at a wide range of points, and ranked the extra points against one another for that effect. Baichongwo (EX-LE3) appeared in the middle of that ranking, below Zigong (EX-CA1), Dannang (EX-LE6) and Yaoyan (EX-B7) and above several others (J Tradit Chin Med 2010;30(1):30–9, PMID 20397460). This is laboratory work in an unrelated physiological system and it establishes nothing clinical about the skin; it is recorded here because it is one of the only two indexed studies that name this point at all.

What is not evidence about this point, stated to prevent the mistake. The research on acupuncture for itch is almost entirely research on its two neighbours. A blinded, randomised, placebo-controlled crossover trial in thirty patients with atopic eczema — one of the better-designed acupuncture studies in dermatology — applied an allergen skin-prick challenge and found needling at Qu Chi and Xue Hai significantly reduced itch intensity and, in the preventive arm, wheal and flare size, compared both with needling at placebo points and with no needling (Allergy 2010;65(7):903–10, PMID 20002660). Bai Chong Wo was not used. Likewise, an association-rule analysis of the acupoints used across forty randomised trials of acupuncture for uraemic pruritus identified a core set built around auricular points, LI-11, BL-17, SP-06 and SP-10 — and Bai Chong Wo was not in it (Tzu Chi Med J 2024;36(2):195–202, PMID 38645789), which is a useful measure of how much less used this point is than its neighbour. A recent randomised trial of acupoint autohaemotherapy in atopic dermatitis used ST-36, SP-10, LI-11 and Ashi points, again without it (Immun Inflamm Dis 2026;14(4):e70453, PMID 42010987).

The fair summary: Bai Chong Wo is a narrowly specialised empirical itch point that stands in the shadow of SP-10, is used far less often than SP-10 in both practice and research, and has been directly studied once, in a small blinded trial of a three-point laser protocol. That is worth knowing, and it is not the same as saying the point does not work.

Source: Sacred Lotus sources & references (name, location and existing use record; SP-06, SP-10, LI-11, BL-17 and ST-36 records, and the Bai Chong Wo cross-reference carried in our own SP-10 record); Deadman & Al-Khafaji, A Manual of Acupuncture, extra points (p. 582); Chinese Acupuncture & Moxibustion (p. 252); PubMed PMID 41921455; 20397460; 20002660; 38645789; 42010987 — each verified resolvable and checked for retraction status before citation; cross-referenced against multiple online sources.