Augmented Priceless Rectify the Qi Powder

Bulhwangeumjeonggi-san with four medicinals added: poria, cnidium, costus root and the ginger and jujube. The base is the Pingwi-san family's damp-transforming frame — atractylodes lancea, magnolia bark, tangerine peel, licorice — with Korean mint and pinellia put in for the stomach, and it is already the standard formula for a cold damp centre with alternating chills and fever. What the additions do is turn it toward the surface and the blood: cnidium moves, costus root frees the qi, poria drains. Why this formula for an abscess is answered in the leaf's own three clauses. Chills and fever coming and going, a wind evil carried along, and 內氣虛餒 — the inner qi weak and starved. That last is the chapter's description of a patient whose body is not mounting a proper response, and the yin-pattern passage above makes the picture explicit: a swelling with a flat head facing inward, sunken and dull, painless, with no heat anywhere. This decoction is named there as assistant to Danggui-ju, and that cross-reference lands here. A cold, indolent, painless abscess in someone debilitated is a real and ominous presentation — the absence of inflammatory signs means the host is not responding, not that the infection is mild. The chapter's instinct, to feed and warm the patient rather than attack the swelling, is sounder than it may look; what it cannot do is drain the cavity. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.