Proven Effect Malaria Elixir

Asafoetida is the drug the formula is named for in all but title — a resin the tradition reserves for masses and food accumulations, and the only one of the three ingredients aimed at the lump at all. Soaking it in boiling water before compounding is both to soften the resin and to take the worst of the smell off it. The realgar and cinnabar beside it are there to drive off the evil, which is the chapter's reading of a chill and fever that will not stop. The administration is the interesting part. One pill, taken cold rather than warm, on an empty stomach, with ginseng decoction to protect the centre; peach kernel decoction instead for the miasmic form; and, as the attack comes on, a pill ground up and smeared around the mouth and nose. That last instruction is aromatic and external — the pill treated as an amulet applied where the breath enters — and sits alongside the 禳 formulas of this chapter rather than with its decoctions. **Contains realgar, which is arsenic sulfide, and cinnabar, which is mercuric sulfide. Both are cumulative poisons and this must not be prepared or taken.** It is recorded for textual completeness only. A fixed lump with unremitting fever needs imaging and a parasitological diagnosis. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.