You might be surprised to learn that auriculotherapy is a newcomer to East Asian medicine. Ear acupuncture was mentioned in some of the classic Chinese medical texts over the years, with specific references to its use for treating jaundice, epidemics, headaches, cataracts, and pain; however, no complete system or anatomical correspondences developed. In other parts of the world, cauterization (burning) of the ear to treat sciatic pain was performed in ancient Greek medicine, and was also part of the Islamic medical canon.

The modern systems of auriculotherapy originated in the late 1950s in Europe, which has a much longer tradition of acupuncture than we do in the U.S., and from there spread back to China. The story goes that a French doctor, Paul Nogier, noticed cauterization scars on the ears of patients whose sciatic pain had been cured; he traced the scars to a lay practitioner in Marseille, Mrs. Barrin, who had learned to treat sciatic pain using the technique from her father, who had himself learned it from a Chinese practitioner. She applied a hot needle to a specific area of the external ear (later determined by Nogier to correspond to the lumbar/sacral junction), and people reported that their sciatic pain disappeared quickly.

Nogier and other practitioners in France and Europe developed a complete system of anatomical correspondences between the ear and the rest of the body; like the homunculus represented in the brain (image search that one for fun if you don’t already know it), the functional activities of the body were mapped to the ear. Using practical experience and research, Nogier and his colleagues discovered that the ear showed correspondences in an inverted somatotopic (or body topography) representation, more colloquially known as the shape of an inverted fetus as it would be resting in the womb.

Chinese acupuncturists, tasked by Mao Zedong with reviving the use of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, learned of Nogier’s work in 1958, and from there quickly studied, developed, and applied auriculotherapy far beyond what had been in practice before. Accordingly, two complete effective systems developed — the Chinese and French systems — which have both overlap and differences, and which have both been further developed in different parts of the world. There have been attempts over the decades to standardize ear maps and point locations; at present, there are variations, though many practitioners draw from both systems.