A. I started suggesting thumping when I noticed some people, especially children, were not strong enough to massage the points effectively. I’ve never seen, energetically, someone’s K-27 damaged by thumping it. I instead see a waking up of the energy—sometimes even a radiating light. While massaging is a great way to stimulate the acupuncture points, thumping can have some advantages. First, it speaks a different language. The body’s most primary rhythms are the heartbeat and all the pulsations through the capillary beds. Tapping an energy point provides a pulsation that the body finds familiar and responds to readily. While massage often gets the same result, sometimes the body tenses against massage, and in those cases tapping can often find its way into the body’s energies where massage can’t. Many practitioners, in fact, use tapping as their primary energy intervention.

Regarding damaged points, your acupuncturist is right, this can be a problem. For instance, the magnetic field around an acupuncture point can have its polarity reversed. Stress can do this. I have also known acupuncture points to be so deep that they appear lost. In both cases tapping, the use of needles, and sometimes the application of magnets, can restore a damaged acupuncture point.