Blood-Moving Powder (Fracture Plaster)

One drug and a splint. Mung bean flour parched to a purple colour, mixed with fresh-drawn water into a thick paste, laid over the break, and bound fast with mulberry bark — or, in the variant, mixed with hot wine and vinegar. 其效如神 is attached to the whole procedure, not to the flour. It is worth being plain about which half of that procedure does the work. Parched bean starch on intact skin is a cooling, drying, slightly astringent paste and nothing more; nothing in it crosses into bone. 以桑皮夾定 is the treatment. Immobilisation is what lets a fracture heal — hold the fragments still and in reasonable alignment and the body builds callus across the gap on its own — and a strip of mulberry bark bound around a starch plaster is a serviceable field splint. Read that way the formula is not a drug claim at all but a casting technique with a vehicle, and the vehicle is cheap, clean and harmless, which is more than can be said for most of what this chapter puts on a wound. What it cannot do is reduce a displaced fracture, hold an unstable one, or tell you that the bone is displaced in the first place. A paste and a bark wrap over an angulated or open fracture leaves it angulated or open. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.