Moxibustion burns mugwort on the skin, and the evidence mostly goes up in smoke
For centuries healers across China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Mongolia have smouldered aged mugwort over chosen points on the body, aiming to warm the flow of qi. Portuguese missionaries called it a fire button. Modern reviews find the research mostly weak, with one intriguing exception involving babies lying the wrong way round.
The raw material is mugwort, a species of Artemisia known in Chinese as ai and in Japanese as yomogi. Suppliers age the leaves and grind them to a fluff, which practitioners burn loose or roll into a cigar-shaped stick. Direct scarring moxibustion lets a small cone burn on the skin until it blisters and later scars; the non-scarring version lifts the ember away earlier; indirect methods keep the heat off the skin, sometimes combined with acupuncture needles.
Tradition gives the practice deep roots. Bian Que, a semi-legendary physician active around 500 BCE and regarded as the first moxibustion specialist, argued that moxa could do things needles could not. Korean folklore credits the legendary ruler Dangun with inventing it. In 1869 Zhang Youheng completed an illustrated treatise mapping the points where moxa should be applied. The first Western accounts came from Portuguese missionaries in 16th-century Japan, and in 1674 Hermann Buschoff published the first European book on it, borrowing the Japanese word mogusa, burning herb, which gave English its moxa.
Supporters present it as a remedy for cold, damp and weakness, and some treat it almost as a cure-all. Most studies come from China and are generally of poor quality; trials on pain, stroke, cancer, constipation and high blood pressure are judged low quality, with positive results possibly inflated by publication bias. The notable exception is breech birth. A 2023 Cochrane review rated as moderate the evidence that adding moxibustion to usual care may lower the chance of a breech presentation and reduce the need for oxytocin during labour.
It is not risk-free. Burns and infections are the obvious hazards, and people have reported nausea, throat irritation and, in pregnancy, abdominal pain from contractions. Mugwort itself carried folk meanings well beyond Asia: Europeans once tucked sprigs under pillows to bring on dreams, and in Anglo-Saxon England the herb was linked with magic.
Source: Moxibustion
