Intestine-Thickening Pill

A Li Dongwon formula and the only one in this run that supplements while it reduces: ginseng and atractylodes sit inside a 消積 pill, with unripe bitter orange, malt and leaven doing the digestive work and magnolia bark, green tangerine peel and tangerine peel red moving qi. The name is the argument — 厚腸, to thicken the intestine, meaning to build the gut back rather than scour it out — and it is the right instinct for the patient the indication actually describes, a child with a distended belly who is wasting. For what 積癖 actually is and why a persistent abdominal mass in a child is an imaging question today, see 進食丸 (jinsik-hwan), where the differential for this batch is set out in full. **Contains pinellia (半夏), which is toxic raw and acridly irritant to the mouth and throat; it must be properly processed, and the leaf does not say that it is. The patient is a child and the chapter gives no dose by weight anywhere.** Beyond that there is nothing dangerous here, which is worth saying plainly, because it makes this the formula of the section most likely to have been given freely. A distended belly with wasting in a small child is most often malnutrition itself, and what reverses malnutrition is food; the digestive ferments in this pill are not food, and ginseng at 3 fun is not protein. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.