Acupuncture for low back pain in huang di nei jing su wen. (Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine Book of Common Questions).

In Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen, among the materials which heretofore have no English translation, there are three Chapters on pain. One of them was devoted entirely to the low back pain. This is certainly an indication of its importance even more than 2,300 years ago. Since it still plagues us nowadays, we have translated that Chapter of this medical classic to see what we can learn from the ancients. We attempted to second guess the ancients in the diagnosis of the various sets of symptoms, in the light of western medicine. We discussed the difficulties in interpreting the archaic text. We pointed out that there were associations of the Mais (i.e., the Meridians) with various sets of symptoms but the loci of puncture were rather vaguely described and had no names. We inserted our selections of currently used acupoints to match the described loci. We would like to solicit our readers' comments.