Harmonize the Stomach Pill

Clove and atractylodes carry the weight at a nyang each, with pinellia behind them and agastache and scorpion tail at a don. Ginger juice makes the paste and a ginger decoction takes it down, so the formula is a warming antiemetic with a convulsion drug added for what the text expects to happen next. The section head says it plainly: 吐瀉久將成慢驚風, long vomiting and diarrhoea will become chronic fright wind, and this is the pill written to meet it before it arrives. That expectation is sound observation. A child who vomits and purges for days does go on to become drowsy, floppy and then convulsive, and the chapter is right that the two belong to one illness. The mechanism is not wind: it is dehydration with hyponatraemia, hypoglycaemia and acidosis, and the convulsion is the metabolic consequence of the fluid loss. **It is prevented and reversed by rehydration, and by nothing in this pill**; the full statement on oral rehydration solution is on 玉露散, the first leaf of this section. A child at this point needs blood sugar and electrolytes measured and fluid given, by vein if the vomiting prevents drinking. **Contains scorpion, whose venom is a neurotoxin, given to a child who may be about to convulse; and pinellia, which is toxic unless properly processed.** The leaf writes 半夏 bare, with no processing given, unlike 半粟散 two leaves earlier. Dried whole scorpion is the standard material and its venom content is not measurable, so the dose cannot be known; **the text gives no dose by weight anywhere**, and ten adzuki-sized pills to a one-year-old is the nearest the chapter comes. **This must not be prepared.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.