Sweetgum Resin Powder

Three drying agents in the larger dose — sweetgum resin, red halloysite and calcined alum — with the two resins for pain and two mineral salts beneath them. The alternative application tells you what it is for: dusted on dry when the sore is running, stirred with oil when it has dried out. The formula is cited twice in this chapter, here for 膁瘡 and again at 2.12 as the outward application for 腎臟風瘡, which puts it among the most used external powders in the sores chapter. The astringent half of it is defensible: alum and halloysite do dry a weeping surface and alum has real antibacterial action. **Contains red lead and calomel, lead and mercury salts, and must not be prepared.** Both are absorbed through a broken skin surface, and a 膁瘡 is by definition a large one that stays open for months, which is the worst case for cumulative metal loading. The chapter itself records mercury poisoning as a complication of its own treatments at 2.2. Omitting the two metals leaves a serviceable astringent powder. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.