Honeysuckle Decoction

The third of the chapter's three honeysuckle leaves, and it adds nothing to the second except a different purpose and two optional drugs. Indong-ju is for the sore in front of you, taken at its first rising. This is the same decoction taken 常服, regularly, 托裏消毒 — supporting the interior and dispersing toxin. The addition tells you which way it leans: astragalus and Korean angelica at two nyang each put it squarely in the 托裏 family of 癰疽 上, beside Sinhyotakri-san, which is these very drugs with honeysuckle at the same weight as the astragalus. 內發外發, breaking out inward or outward, is the claim worth noticing, and so is the pairing of 乳癰 with 腸癰. Breast abscess the tradition could see and drain. Intestinal abscess it could only infer, and the Bogam's 腸癰 leaves describe something very like appendicitis with a walled-off collection. An oral decoction for that is a death sentence by modern standards, and the honest reading of this leaf has to say so plainly. Taken with the pill and the wine, the three leaves make the chapter's clearest single statement: one drug, three preparations, used for prevention, for the acute sore and for the long course. Honeysuckle earned that place, and of everything in 癰疽 it is the entry a pharmacologist would look at twice. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.