Drain the Fright Pill

The 實 member of the triad the section names at 所謂溫驚丸利驚丸涼驚丸者 — depleted, warm it; replete, drain it; hot, cool it. This is the draining one, and it drains hard: five don of black morning-glory seed, which is the chapter's standard drastic purgative, with bamboo silica and indigo to cool and calomel to carry it down. **This should be said once for the whole section, and here is the place. Nothing in these formulas stops a seizure, and a simple febrile seizure does not need anything to — it stops by itself, usually within a couple of minutes, and the child is well afterwards.** Two to five children in a hundred have one. What the child needs is to be laid on their side, left alone, and then examined for the cause of the fever; what the child does not need is to be purged. **Contains calomel — 輕粉, mercurous chloride — a mercury salt, and black morning-glory seed, a violent purgative, in a pill written for a one-year-old. This must not be prepared.** This is the most dangerous single line in the batch, and not only because of the mercury. Calomel was given to children in exactly this way, as a purging and teething powder, well into the twentieth century, and it caused acrodynia — pink disease — with pain, peeling hands and feet, hypertension and deaths, until it was withdrawn from children's medicines in the 1950s. Purging a febrile, convulsing child also strips the fluid and electrolytes they are least able to spare. The mercury paragraph under Jinsa-go-soa applies to the calomel too. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.