Method for Taking Pus Through the Skin

The title is the claim: 隔皮取膿, taking the pus out through the skin without cutting it. A paste of aconite, salt, buckwheat flour and roasted donkey hoof is spread on thick paper and laid over the swelling, and the fluid is said to come out 自毛孔, through the hair follicles. It does not work, and it cannot. Pus does not cross intact skin; follicles are not channels out of a deep collection. What the paste can do is draw a little serum from the surface, and salt and aconite together will numb and redden the area, which is probably why it convinced. But the principle underneath the claim is the chapter's own and is exactly right: a collection of pus has to come out, and the whole section this leaf sits in — 替鍼丸, 透膿散, 射膿丸, 打膿散, 追毒餠, 竹筒吸毒方 — is a record of people trying every available way to achieve that without a blade, because the blade was so dangerous. Incision and drainage, and needle aspiration of a collection under ultrasound, are the modern forms of this same reasoning, and they are among the most reliably effective things done in medicine. **Contains wild aconite, which is toxic and is absorbed through skin, and roasted donkey hoof, a raw animal material carrying an infection risk. This must not be prepared.** Nor should a swelling be opened at home with any instrument: cutting into a cellulitic or undrained swelling with unsterile equipment seeds the infection deeper and can turn a treatable abscess into a spreading one. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.