Major Forsythia Decoction for Sores in Children

Fifteen drugs in one small packet with bamboo leaf and rush pith added at the pot, and the weights are the point: 4 fun of licorice at the top, most of the rest at 2 fun, which is under a gram apiece. Whatever else is true of this chapter, here it has scaled the packet down for the body it is going into. The composition is a wide clearing formula with three jobs stacked in it — forsythia, bupleurum, scutellaria and schizonepeta against the heat and the wind; plantago seed, dianthus, talc, akebia and rush pith to carry the heat out through the urine; burdock seed and cicada moulting for the skin itself, with angelica and red peony to move and cool the blood underneath. 諸瘡 in a child is bacterial skin infection: impetigo, infected eczema, folliculitis and boils, and behind the itching ones, scabies. What changed the outcome of these was topical and oral antibiotics, and for scabies permethrin or ivermectin — cheap, specific, and curative in days. A cooling decoction does not clear a staphylococcal or streptococcal skin infection, and the one thing in this section that would genuinely have helped is not a formula at all: the section head's own advice, 頻與澡洗更衣, frequent washing and changed clothes in mild weather, which it calls 外宣 and explicitly says needs no medicine. That is hygiene, and it is right. Nothing in this formula is poisonous, which makes it one of the safer things in the chapter. **The leaf gives no dose by weight for the child** — one packet is one packet, whether the patient is a month old or three years old — and that is the limit on it. The section's two prose companions are worth reading beside it: 1.56.1 紅絲瘤, the red-thread tumour that recurred in child after child of one father, reads as an infantile haemangioma, and 1.56.2 藥毒成淋 is this book recording its own harm — a boy with lifelong painful urination that the physician traced to the drugs his father had taken, 父得燥熱且能病子. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.