Canker Dissolving Pill

**Contains toad ash, which carries cardiac glycosides, and aloe resin, a stimulant laxative. The patient is a child, the text gives no dose by weight anywhere, and this must not be prepared.** The full statements are on 月蟾丸 and 十全丹 in this same section. **蕪荑 is a genuine anthelmintic** and the dosing problem that creates is set out on 布袋丸, also in this section. Because the whole formula is 等分 — equal parts, with no quantity named at all — there is not even a ratio to argue about here: a child is given ten or twenty pills of an unmeasured mixture containing a cardiac glycoside and a purgative. What the text describes is unusually concrete and worth reading literally. A foul-smelling fluid runs from the nose, and wherever it runs it raises sores — that is, the discharge itself excoriates the upper lip and nostril. In a young child the common causes are a retained foreign body in one nostril, chronic purulent sinusitis, nasal diphtheria, and congenital syphilis; in a severely malnourished child it may also be the nasal beginning of the same gangrenous process that becomes 走馬牙疳 in the mouth, on which see 立效散 in this section. Each of those is a different problem with a different answer — removal, antibiotics, antitoxin, penicillin — and the first step now is to look up the nose. The formula itself is the standard 疳 shelf: two bitter berberine roots, indigo, a worm drug, a purgative and an ashed toad, with 白芷 and 川芎 added as the drugs the tradition sends to the nose and head. Berberine has real antibacterial activity, which is the most that can be claimed. None of it removes a bean from a nostril or neutralises diphtheria toxin, and none of it feeds the child. On that last point see 立效散 in this same section. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.