[Mutual promotion, mutual assistance and mutual inhibition in the compatibility of acupoints]

Mutual promotion, mutual assistance and mutual inhibition are commonly for the compatibility of Chinese herbs, but they are also existed among the acupoints. In the paper, the relevant literature on acupoint, compatibility was collected and the mutual promotion, mutual assistance and mutual inhibition relationships of acupoints were described. The laws of the above mentioned combinations, the theoretic evidences and modern researches were summarized briefly. The mutual promotion and mutual assistance refer to the coordination of acupoints, presenting the relationship of the primary and the secondary about the mutual assistance. Hereby, the acupoints could be divided into the simple assistant acupoints and the acupoints from the affected meridians. The mutual inhibition is used to describe the antagonism effect in acupoint combination. There are more researches on the mutual promotion of acupoint combination but less ones on the mutual inhibition and its mechanism is just hypothetic. It is very important to have the deep study on those compatibility relationships for the improvement of acupuncture efficacy and to elaborate the effect mechanism.