Soul-Restoring Powder

One packet used twice over, which is the leaf's whole design: the decoction is drunk and then the spent dregs are pounded with a nyang of cotton rose leaf and honey water and laid on the sore as a poultice overnight. Nothing is wasted and the same drugs work from both sides. Among the chapter's many formulas this is the one that most clearly belongs to the 內消 group — the aim is to make the swelling disperse before it suppurates, not to bring it to a head. The composition is a pus-and-swelling set rather than a heat-clearing one. Gleditsia spine, pangolin scale and honeysuckle flower are the chapter's piercing-and-resolving trio; fritillaria, trichosanthes root and pinellia dissolve the mass as phlegm; anemarrhena cools; bletilla and frankincense close and relieve pain. Cotton rose leaf is a classic cooling poultice for a hot swelling and is the one drug reserved entirely for the outside. Two claims in the indication need naming as claims. 去毒化爲黑水, 從小便出 — the toxin turning to black water and passing in the urine — is doctrine rather than observation, and 萬無一失, not one failure in ten thousand, is advertisement. **Contains pangolin scale, which is CITES Appendix I and prohibited in trade, and raw pinellia, which is toxic unless properly processed. A bowl of wine reduced by half is a substantial alcohol dose. This must not be prepared as written.** The 脫疽疔 passage sends a light case to this powder together with 仙方活命飮 after moxa through garlic; a dark, painless, sinking sore it sends elsewhere, and that distinction is sound — a spreading or necrotic sore needs antibiotics and surgery, and in a diabetic foot it needs vascular assessment as well. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.