Transform the Qi and Regulate the Channels Decoction

A powder rather than a decoction, despite the 湯 in the name, and the proportions make the intention plain: two nyang of tangerine peel and a nyang each of wine-dressed cyperus, notopterygium and angelica dahurica, against only five don each of the four node-softening drugs. The weight is in the Qi-moving half. 化氣, transform the Qi, is the name's first claim, and the chapter's reasoning for it is given in the 綱目 passage this leaf answers to: 流注癧者婦人多有之, 其性急躁, 其氣怫鬱, 其心熱着 — flowing scrofula is commonest in women, whose temper is hasty, whose Qi is knotted and whose Heart heat is lodged. The formula is written against that reading of the cause. Oyster-shell powder, trichosanthes root and gleditsia thorn are the softening and opening drugs, the first two for a hard node and the thorn for a track that needs to drain. 瘰癧 is tuberculous lymphadenitis, and 流注瘰癧 — nodes that start at the neck, break, and then appear down the limbs and over the body with sinuses running into one another — is disseminated tuberculous disease with multiple cold abscesses and discharging tracks. The chapter's own prognosis is bleak and accurate: 不療自破孔竅相穿寒熱疼痛, untreated it opens of itself, the holes burrow into each other, and there is fever and pain. Nothing in this formula treats tuberculosis; the disease needs multidrug antituberculous therapy, and before that existed it killed slowly. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.