Korean Hand Therapy

Origin in the early 1970s

A 2003 Korea JoongAng Daily feature reports that Yoo Tae-woo, an oriental medicine physician, created the hand-based system in 1971 while treating his own headaches, and based it on the belief that disrupted blood flow to the brain affects organ function. This is a journalist's account of the founder's own statements, and the date has not been checked against Yoo's own publications. The Korean name for the method is Koryo Sooji Chim.

Two Korean hand surgeons write that hand acupuncture therapy is a type of alternative medicine in Korea in which the hand is treated as a homunculus, a miniature representation of the whole body, and that its therapists believe stimulating the hand can improve bodily health. The same authors state that scientific evidence for the concept is still needed.

Relation to other hand and microsystem methods

Korean hand therapy is one of several hand-based systems. A 2020 comparison by authors at a Chinese university examined eight widely used hand acupuncture schools, including traditional hand acupuncture and a Korean finger needle approach, and found that point positioning and needling methods were not unified and that the conditions each school treats best were not specified. The authors called for standardization.

Other microsystem methods, such as ear-point stimulation, are covered on the Auricular Acupuncture page. Findings for ear-point methods are not carried over to hand-based methods on this page, and the hand-versus-ear question is not addressed by the sources reviewed here.

Names and abbreviations

The method appears in English-language journals under several names: Koryo hand therapy, abbreviated KHT, Korean hand acupuncture, abbreviated KHA, and Koryo hand acupuncture. A 2005 anesthesia trial refers to K-D2 as the Korean hand acupressure point in Koryo hand therapy. The abbreviation KHT is also used for a needle-free form delivered to children in a 2015 pediatric report.

Points are labeled with a K- prefix and a letter and number, such as K-D2 and K-A20. These labels belong to the Korean hand system and are not the same as the meridian-based point names used in body acupuncture; the thyroid-surgery trial notes that K-D2 is not identical to the Chinese point Pericardium 6.

Hand therapy as a separate field

In healthcare, the term hand therapy most often refers to rehabilitation of hand and upper-limb injuries delivered by occupational therapists or physical therapists. That field is distinct from Korean hand therapy and is described in the section on disambiguation below. Readers searching for a hand rehabilitation therapist are looking for the mainstream field, not for this practice.

The hand map and point selection

According to the 2003 feature, the method locates tender points on the hand that are said to correspond to body regions, with the middle finger standing for the head and the other fingers for the limbs. Practitioners find sensitive zones with a blunt probe and stimulate them with small needles, herbs, magnets or pressure. A session typically uses about 10 points, needles are inserted about 1 to 3 millimeters for 20 to 30 minutes, and treatment is described as daily or on alternate days.

Trial protocols vary. A sham-controlled irritable bowel syndrome trial used 16 hand points for 25 minutes twice a week for 4 weeks, and its sham group was treated at areas described as unrelated to bowel symptoms. A pilot study of premenstrual symptoms framed the treatment in qi, yin, yang and five-element theory and gave 10 sessions of either hand needling or hand moxibustion.

Needle-free and topical forms

Several studies stimulated a Korean hand point without needles. Capsicum plaster or capsaicin ointment was applied at K-D2 or K-A20 before surgery and removed about 8 hours afterward, and one pediatric review used a needle-free form of Korean hand therapy. In those studies the stimulus is a skin irritant or pressure, which differs from needling and should be kept in mind when reading their results.

Descriptions of where K-D2 lies are not identical across sources. One trial places it on the lateral side of the distal index finger, while a nursing trial applied the plaster at K-D2 on the second and fourth fingers. A reader should check the point definition in each study before comparing them.

Conditions addressed in published studies

Published studies of Korean hand therapy or hand acupuncture have examined postoperative nausea and vomiting, postoperative sore throat, menopausal symptoms, premenstrual symptoms, chronic low back pain, irritable bowel syndrome and pain after tonsillectomy in children. These are conditions that investigators chose to study, not conditions for which benefit has been established.

A survey of Chinese-language literature from 1953 to 2017 on hand acupuncture in general found it reported across surgery, internal medicine, pediatrics, eye, ear, nose and throat, gynecology and dermatology. The authors report high rates of a combined category of complete and marked improvement, but the survey summarizes published reports and does not apply controls, and it concerns hand acupuncture broadly rather than the Korean system.

The founder's stated limits

In the 2003 feature, Yoo is quoted as saying that conditions requiring surgery and infectious diseases cannot be treated with hand acupuncture. That statement is the founder's own boundary for the method; it is not a systematic list of indications or contraindications.

Postoperative nausea, vomiting and sore throat

The most controlled studies concern capsaicin applied at Korean hand points. In a randomized, double-blind trial of 186 patients after laparoscopic cholecystectomy, capsaicin ointment at K-D2 gave an absolute risk reduction in nausea and vomiting of 21 percent over 0 to 6 hours and 11 percent over 6 to 24 hours compared with placebo ointment. In a four-arm trial of 184 thyroid surgery patients with 46 per group, nausea at 24 hours was 22 percent with capsicum plaster at K-D2, against 59 percent with inactive tape and 50 percent with plaster on the shoulders as a sham.

The thyroid trial's authors state that its groups are small for this type of study and note that capsaicin itself may act on vagal modulation, so the result cannot be attributed to the hand point alone. A 68-patient nursing trial added capsicum plaster at K-D2 to ramosetron and found less nausea at 2 hours. A 150-patient trial using K-A20 reported moderate to severe sore throat at 24 hours in 0 percent of the treated group and 16 to 19 percent of the controls.

Women's health and low back pain: non-randomized studies

A Korean study of 44 women found that eight weeks of Koryo hand therapy, three times a week, was accompanied by differences in follicle-stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone but not estradiol, along with fewer self-reported menopausal symptoms. A separate 45-participant nonequivalent-control study reported similar findings; whether the samples overlap was not determined. Both used non-randomized designs.

A pilot study of premenstrual symptoms reported lower symptom severity after 10 sessions of either hand needling or hand moxibustion compared with controls, with thermography changes only in the moxibustion group. A 63-patient back pain study combined hand acupuncture with another intervention, so its pain and activity findings cannot be assigned to hand acupuncture alone. Neither design randomized participants.

Sham-controlled and uncontrolled studies

A sham-controlled trial in 42 women with irritable bowel syndrome reported less loose stool, bloating and abdominal pain in the treated group, but no significant effect on stress, mental health or heart rate variability. An uncontrolled retrospective review of 29 children offered needle-free Korean hand therapy after tonsillectomy reported mean pain falling from 5.03 to 3.06 out of 10, with no comparison group and self-selected participants.

A trial of a different, single-needle hand technique in 24 patients with musculoskeletal pain found improvement in all three arms and no advantage over the control techniques. It does not test Koryo hand therapy, but it shows that before-and-after improvement cannot be attributed to the points alone.

What the searches did not find

Searches of PubMed for Korean hand acupuncture, Koryo hand therapy, hand acupuncture reviews and related terms did not identify a systematic review or meta-analysis of Korean hand therapy. The reviews retrieved concerned wrist-ankle acupuncture, a different method, and are not carried over.

The mainstream rehabilitation field

In most healthcare settings hand therapy is not acupuncture. The American Society of Hand Therapists describes it as the art and science of evaluating and treating injuries and conditions of the upper extremity, from shoulder to hand, and says a hand therapist is an occupational or physical therapist with advanced education and experience. Its certified hand therapist credential requires at least three years of practice and 4,000 hours of treatment, plus an examination.

Professional bodies in the United Kingdom

The British Association of Hand Therapists describes itself as a UK charity and clinical interest group for hand rehabilitation, with membership of occupational therapists and physiotherapists. A hand therapist in this sense does not practice Korean hand therapy by virtue of the title, and a Koryo hand therapy practitioner is not thereby a rehabilitation hand therapist.

Reported adverse effects

The sources reviewed contain little systematic information on harms. The pediatric review of needle-free Korean hand therapy reported no adverse effects apart from one child who reported a slight increase in pain. A PubMed-indexed article titled Hand acupuncture and vascular injury exists, but its abstract was not available and no finding from it is stated here.

The abstracts of the other trials reviewed did not report adverse events in detail, and the absence of such reports does not show absence of harm. Needling carries general needle-related risks, and capsicum products applied to skin can irritate; these sources do not quantify either for Korean hand therapy.

Suitability and care boundaries

The founder is quoted as stating that conditions needing surgery and infectious diseases are not suited to the method. The trials reviewed were conducted in hospital or research settings in which stimulation was added to usual perioperative or nursing care, and the sources do not support using it in place of such care. Readers with a medical condition should not delay or replace necessary care.

No statutory regulation, training standard or professional register specific to Korean hand therapy was found in the sources reviewed. The 2020 comparison of hand acupuncture schools states that positioning and needling methods are not unified, so practitioner qualifications and techniques may differ between schools.