Ice and Frost Powder

The name is the sensation it is meant to give — ice and frost. Four cooling and drying minerals in equal measure, mirabilite and glauberite among them, which do feel cold as they dissolve, with calcined oyster shell for absorbency and indigo for the colour and the cooling it is credited with. Four fifths of this formula is a sensible burn powder. The fifth is not. **Calomel is mercurous chloride and this must not be prepared.** A burn is the single worst surface to put a mercury salt on: the barrier is gone over a wide area, absorption is near complete, and burn patients are already losing fluid and protein. Mercury poisoning from calomel applied to broken skin is well documented, and this chapter itself records it at 2.2 as a complication of its own treatment. **The first aid the chapter gives at 2.15 must not be followed either** — 急向火灸, hold it to the fire, and 愼勿以冷物搨之, press nothing cold on it, are both backwards. Cool running water for twenty minutes, within the first three hours, is what limits the depth of the burn. The one remedy in this section modern practice endorses is the honey of the 單方 at 2.15.1. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.