Astragalus Decoction for Chronic Fright Wind

Three drugs: astragalus, ginseng and mix-fried licorice, with white peony optional. That is 保元湯, and the leaf says so — Preserve the Origin Decoction, one of the shortest qi-supplementing formulas in the tradition and the base from which a long line of paediatric and smallpox prescriptions is built. Dongwon gives it for the same indication as his 益黃散 and with the same argument: solidify the spleen first, drain the liver afterwards. The one clinical observation worth keeping is the sign. 大便泄靑色 — green diarrhoeal stool — was read as the liver's colour appearing where it should not, and taken as the warning that an acute fright was turning chronic. Green stool in an infant is in fact unremarkable on its own; it usually means bile has passed through a fast gut without being fully reduced, which is to say it means rapid transit. Read that way the sign is not wrong, only differently explained: it marks a child whose gut is emptying fast, which is a child losing fluid. Nothing here is toxic, and nothing here treats a convulsion. The three drugs give a small amount of sweet decoction. For what the child actually needed, see the note on `baekchul-san-soa`. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.