As I noted above, I'm not a practitioner of Chinese martial arts, so feel free to take this with a grain of salt, but this fellow has a treatise on using the weapons that suggests they're not that dangerous to the user.
The most common complaint about these blades is that they are more dangerous to you than your opponent. The danger of cutting yourself on these seems like an inherent risk. To discern if this is an actual danger, two things need to be looked at; the ease or difficulty one has wielding the weapons without touching themselves in a way that would allow for a cut, and how sharp does the weapon need to be.
Through all of my time using these in solo forms and sparring, I have never had a problem with hitting myself or delivering cuts to my own body accidentally. Even the points of the weapon don’t do much more than limit your movement in order to avoid them. So, even if these had a razor’s edge on them, (which I do not think is necessary for this weapon to be effective) the danger of cutting one’s self would seem to be limited to the non-combat time handling of the weapon (cleaning, transporting, concealing etc.).
They do not do much discussing of the inner prongs for attacking, but they do allude to using those points to dissuade attempts to disarm.
One very interesting thing that we have stumbled upon recently is that they are very difficult to disarm. The position of the blades, their curvature, and the size of the weapon make it very easy to poke at the hand of and other wise dissuade the opponent from grabbing on to your hand or the weapon. If the blades are sharp, it can also cut someone who tried to grab at the hand or wrist. But even here, the blades do not have to be sharp to stab the hand enough to get them to let go.
