[History and progress of study on electrical properties of acupoints at home and abroad]

Ninety articles on electrical properties of acupoints and 38 closely related articles with the time raged from 1950s' till present were retrieved and studied from Pubmed, CNKI and VIP databases. Conclusions indicate that most of the low-resistance points or high potential points of the skin are in accordance with acupoints. However, not every acupoint shows the property of low-resistance or high potential feature. The electrical properties of acupoints vary with the physiological and pathological changes of the human body. And the electrical properties of acupoints which share the same name on the affected meridians located symmetrically on bilateral sides of the body were in a condition of imbalance. However, the result of measurement can be affected by the type of apparatus, intensity, size and number of the electrode etc. Therefore, the future study should be focused on the reaction laws of electrical properties of acupoints under physiological and pathological conditions through selection of different resistance measurement apparatus and strictly control of the impacting factors during the researching process.