While heat transfer plays an important role in thermal therapies by moxibustion, little information is currently available in the literature. Our aim is to get the temperature distribution beneath the skin surface and reveal how an imposed heat can affect blood flow in vessels and vice versa. For a better understanding of the heat transfer process due to moxibustion, skin temperature measurement is conducted to get the skin surface temperature, which enables us to carry out a numerical simulation of heat/flow equations in human legs. Subject to the measured skin surface temperature by virtue of the calibrated real time infrared camera, the temperature beneath the heating position and the heat transfer in blood vessel are numerically obtained. When the temperature becomes higher, blood flow velocity is found to increase in this study because of the accompanying decreased viscosity. Both of the lying and standing poses are investigated in the current moxibustion study. For the lying case, the blood flow has a higher mean velocity while for the case of standing pose a larger change of the mean velocity is predicted. From the thermal energy point of view, the lying pose is a better choice because its resulting higher blood flow velocity can transfer heat more effectively to the whole body. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.