Azure Mist Stick

The second of the four 疔 sticks, and the one aimed at a particular sign: 不覺痛, a sore in which no pain is felt. That is the reading the chapter takes most seriously across the whole of 癰疽 — an insensate swelling is a dead one, and 巴豆膏 says the same thing a few leaves earlier when it calls 肉不知痛 the worst finding. The sticks are graded by it, and this one is for the dead centre. Three drugs and no herbs. Verdigris makes up the bulk and gives the stick its name — 碧霞, azure mist, is the blue-green of the copper salt — with sal ammoniac and toad venom behind it, bound with cooked rice. It is the plainest of the four in composition and, like the rest, it is put into a needled sore under a plaster rather than taken. **Contains verdigris, a copper salt, and toad venom, which contains cardiac-glycoside bufadienolides and has caused deaths at ordinary doses. This must not be prepared.** An arsenical or metallic escharotic left in an open wound is absorbed systemically and destroys viable tissue alongside dead, and a painless necrotic lesion is the presentation that most needs assessment the same day rather than a dressing: in a diabetic foot, in a limb with poor perfusion, or in a necrotising soft-tissue infection, loss of sensation over a swelling is a surgical sign. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.