Acupuncture involves placing needles at acupoints found using proportional
measurements devised ~2,000 years ago that use the width of a person’s thumb as the basic unit, a cun. An ‘average’ man is described in the ancient Spiritual Pivot as 75 cun tall with a 26 cun head circumference. We wanted to know whether this is still true. We measured height, head circumference and thumb width of 80 delegates at the 2023 British Acupuncture Council conference and recorded their sex. We calculated each participant’s height and head circumference in cun, then calculated overall averages for the group and for each sex separately. Finally, we tested for statistically meaningful differences between the sexes, and considered how large the gap between ancient and modern men was compared to modern sex differences. Our participants were all proportionally taller and larger in head circumference than the ancient men, and
averaged 88.8 cun, more than even ‘very tall’ ancients. Women were proportionally taller than men, probably because they have slenderer thumbs. Head circumference was less different between the past and the present than height, perhaps because long bones are more affected by changing environments and nutrition than the flat bones of the skull. Overall, our findings suggest that the modern people we sampled are indeed proportionally different from the ancient Chinese, though we note the caveat that our participants were mostly British. Exploring proportional measurements more fully in future might clarify how best to locate acupoints across a diverse patient group.