Ear Seeds Placement Chart
Learn what ear seeds are and download our Ear Seeds Placement Chart template!
Fact Checked by Ericka Pingol.
What are ear seeds?
Ear seeds are products used in traditional Chinese medicine. They’re part of auriculotherapy, a staple of traditional Chinese medicine focusing on the ear. It’s also known as ear acupressure or acupuncture.
An ear seed is an acupressure tool and is an alternative to acupuncture if a person doesn’t want their ears pierced by thin needles. They’re used to stimulate spots in the ear called pressure points to benefit our central nervous system and relieve particular ailments that may be bothering us, like anxiety and insomnia.
Printable Ear Seeds Placement Chart
Download this Ear Seeds Placement Chart for healthcare professionals to effectively utilize auriculotherapy techniques for treating various conditions and promoting holistic wellness in patients.
How do ear seeds work?
People can learn how to apply seeds on their ears, though we recommend that they see acupuncture specialists to learn more about this and have an expert do it to avoid mistakes, especially when placing a seed on a pressure point.
The acupressure specialist handling you will begin by cleaning your ears with swabs. These swabs have alcohol.
Before applying the seeds to your ears, they will ask if you have any allergies to latex, adhesives, or metals or if you have sensitive skin. They will use Vaccaria seeds or ceramic ones to prevent irritations if you have allergies or sensitive skin. They will attach these using tweezers.
That’s it on the side of acupressure specialists! After applying the seeds, they will tell you to massage your ear seeds twice to thrice daily. The massage should be of circular motion and should be gentle.
The person with ear seeds must remove or change them within three to five days. They can remove them using tweezers to pull them off the ear’s pressure points.
People can also buy ear seed kits to apply the seeds independently.
What is an Ear Seeds Placement Chart?
Speaking of buying ear seed kits, these kits come with ear seed placement charts. These are nifty handouts that you can use to study the pressure points of the ears and where you should be placing them.
Acupressure and acupuncture specialists also have these charts to help educate their patients before they undergo ear seed placement procedures.
What information can you expect from this chart?
Ear seed placement charts show a picture of an ear. This picture contains several small circles and lines pointing to specific pressure points in the ear. Each point is labeled with the particular parts of our body to which each pressure point corresponds.
The number of labeled points will differ depending on the kit a person buys. Some have multiple charts to show which combination of pressure points a person should attach seeds to for a particular condition they might have.
How does our Ear Seeds Placement Chart template work?
Our ear seeds placement chart template lists as many pressure points as possible and what part of our body each corresponds to. Each pressure point has a designated number. Beside this picture of the ear is a list with all the pressure points and their corresponding numbers.
This template emulates the version created by TCMTips (Free Ear Seeds Placement Chart - Easy TCM Wisdom : Your Path to DIY Health and Wellness, 2023), which indicates the combination of pressure points one should apply ear seeds to for a specific condition they’re dealing with, so all you need to do is follow the particular arrangement for the particular condition your patient has.
Ear Seeds Placement Chart example:
Now that you know what to expect from our template, we’d like to show you what it looks like. It’s a simple diagram showing an ear. This diagram only shows the skin of the ear and not the different parts of an ear, given that the ear seeds are external objects placed on the skin.
At the bottom, you will see a notice that says which pressure points are on the surface and which are on the ear's underside. There’s also a list of conditions and which combination a person should go for depending on the ailment they want addressed.
If you like what you see, download our free Ear Seeds Placement Chart! We hope it helps you with your acupressure practice or helps educate you about the pressure points of the ear that you can target using ear seeds.
Download our free Ear Seeds Placement Chart template example here:
What are the benefits of using ear seeds?
It can help with pain management
According to a study entitled A Randomized Clinical Trial of Auricular Point Acupressure for Lower Back Pain: A Feasibility Study written by Chao Hsing Yeh and company, ear seeds can help reduce the pain felt by those with lower back pain (Yeh et al., 2013).
Their study had two groups, one of which included ear seeds placed in pressure points associated with lower back pain and the other with ear seeds placed in other pressure points.
The former had displayed significant pain reduction (approximately 75% pain reduction).
It can help improve sleep
Those who are dealing with sleep issues like insomnia sometimes lean on traditional Chinese medicine for help. Acupuncture and acupressure are said to help with this.
A study entitled Auricular acupuncture with seed or pellet attachments for primary insomnia: a systematic review and meta-analysis by Ying Lan and company discovered that using ear seeds and acupuncture together “seemingly” reduced insomnia symptoms in those they assessed. Further research is still needed for this (Lan et al., 2015).
It can help people reduce and manage weight
Using ear seeds can yield weight reduction! While further studies need to be conducted, one research article entitled Auricular acupressure for overweight and obese individuals, written by Ching-Feng Huang and their group, observed that ear seeds can help people cut down body weight, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, body fat mass, and body fat percentage (Huang et al., 2019).
Are there any risks to using ear seeds?
Using ear seeds comes with some risks, most of them not too bad, but there are two that you want to be careful about.
Earlier, we mentioned that those with allergies or sensitive skin might suffer skin irritations, so the type of ear seed placed on the ears should be considered. That’s why having a professional place the ear seeds for you is also recommended instead of doing things yourself.
Other potential problems include:
- becoming dizzy and nauseous as a result of stimulating the wrong parts of your body;
- the ear seed falling into your ear, which requires a specialist to remove; and
- accidental labor, so it’s best for expecting mothers to wait after giving birth before using ear seeds.
Why use Carepatron as your general practice software?
Thanks for reading this guide! We hope this helped you get acquainted or reintroduced to what ear seeds are. We also hope our ear seed placement chart template helps you with your acupressure practice!
While we still have you, we’d like to ask you for your time to check more of the Carepatron platform if you haven’t. We have a wide array of nifty features that will help you streamline your work and improve the quality of your output! We’re confident they’re fantastic and helpful enough that you’ll consider us your number-one general practice and patient portal software.
Moreover, we've got you covered if you specialize in treating ears and hearing. We have guides for hearing tests like the Whisper, Weber, and Rinne Tests that you can read if you need refreshers on conducting these. We even have templates for these tests to help you record and convey results to your patients and colleagues.
We even have a guide for ear assessments conducted by nurses and one for assessing patients for ear infections! They, too, come with templates. What’s great about all these is that they’re free, so you can read as many guides as you want and download as many templates as you need!
Subscribe now to enjoy streamlined workflows and cover more ground with your therapeutic work!
References:
Huang, C., Guo, S., & Chou, F. (2019). Auricular acupressure for overweight and obese individuals. Medicine, 98(26), e16144. https://doi.org/10.1097/md.0000000000016144
Lan, Y., Wu, X., Tan, H., Wu, N., Xing, J., Wu, F., Zhang, L., & Liang, F. (2015). Auricular acupuncture with seed or pellet attachments for primary insomnia: a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 15(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12906-015-0606-7
TCM Wisdom (2023). Easy TCM Wisdom : Your Path to DIY Health and Wellness. https://tcmtips.com/free-ear-seeds-placement-chart/
Yeh, C. H., Chien, L., Balaban, D., Sponberg, R., Primavera, J., Morone, N. E., Glick, R. M., Albers, K. M., Cohen, S. M., Ren, D., Huang, L., & Suen, L. K. P. (2013). A Randomized Clinical trial of auricular point acupressure for chronic low back pain: A Feasibility study. Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine (Print), 2013, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1155/2013/196978
Commonly asked questions
Ear seeds can fall off after three to five days. If they don’t, it’s best to wear them for only three to five days, then remove them.
They come with adhesives or stickers. They will lose their sticking power over time due to moisture.
Most of the time, no. It would be best to consult with a specialist to see if it’s possible, depending on the severity of the infection.
