A paper published in Zhongguo zhen jiu = Chinese acupuncture & moxibustion proposes that the concept of deqi, the distinctive needle sensation sought during acupuncture, underwent a conceptual reversal across history: what was once understood as a result of correct needling came to be treated as a premise or precondition for it. The author, Zhao J, argues this shift influenced how reinforcing and reducing acupuncture techniques were understood and applied.
What the evidence does and does not show is difficult to assess because no abstract is available for this article. Every claim here is inferred from the title alone. The method cannot be determined; based on the title's language about conceptual evolution, the work appears to be a historical or theoretical analysis rather than a clinical trial or experimental study, but that characterisation is speculative.
Because no abstract or full text was accessible, the study's strength of evidence, its source materials, and the scope of its historical argument remain unknown. Readers should treat the reported finding as a hypothesis about intellectual history rather than an established result. Whether deqi was consistently framed one way or the other across acupuncture's recorded history, and whether any shift in framing produced measurable changes in clinical practice, cannot be evaluated from a title alone.
For consciousness studies, the question carries genuine interest. Deqi is a first-person, interoceptive experience, a somatic signal generated at the periphery and interpreted within a broader theoretical framework. How practitioners and theorists categorise that sensation, as evidence of therapeutic effect or as a necessary condition for it, may shape both the phenomenology reported by patients and the experimental designs used to study needle sensation. This paper may bear on that question, but its argument cannot be evaluated without access to the full text.
Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42618238/ (DOI: 10.13703/j.0255-2930.20260529-k0003)