Supplement the Centre and Overcome Toxin Cake

A Bojungikgi-tang in another dosage form. Astragalus leads, with cimicifuga, bupleurum, licorice, tangerine peel and ginseng behind it — six of Li Dongyuan's seven — and the only additions are forsythia at a full don, a raw-and-cooked rehmannia pair with white peony and Korean angelica to moisten, and siler. 補中 in the name is literal: this is the centre-supplementing formula adapted to a disease that wastes people, with just enough forsythia to answer the 毒. The cake form is the unusual part. The powder is bound with hot-soaked steamed bread, pressed into two cakes and sun-dried, and one cake is then pounded back to powder for each dose — which makes it a two-dose preparation, and makes the whole batch the unit the weights describe. The chapter names it twice: at 肝燥火動而筋攣補中勝毒餠爲主, for the dry Liver with fire stirring and the sinews drawn, and again under 補虛. That is the honest half of the chapter's thinking about scrofula. 瘰癧 is tuberculous lymphadenitis, and the patient the Bogam is describing — wasting, with afternoon fever and chains of nodes that break and will not close — has chronic tuberculous disease. 若月經行寒熱不作則可生稍久轉爲潮熱危矣, the section says of a woman with this: while her periods come and she has no fever she may live, but once it turns to tidal fever she is in danger. That is an accurate clinical observation about tuberculosis and it is also an admission that the formula does not cure it. Supportive nutrition genuinely helps a tuberculous patient; it does not treat the infection, which needs multidrug antituberculous therapy. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.