Ginseng Goitre-Dissolving Elixir

Three of the first four drugs are seaweeds, dried over heat and taken as a honey pill held in the mouth three times a day, and ten pig and ten sheep thyroid glands are ground in with them. This is the one prescription in the chapter where the traditional drug and the modern mechanism are the same thing. Endemic goitre is iodine deficiency; sargassum, kelp and sea tangle are the richest dietary sources of iodine there are; and the thyroid gland of a food animal contains thyroid hormone, which is the drug still used for hypothyroid goitre. A pill of seaweed and thyroid, held in the mouth and swallowed slowly after meals, is iodine replacement with thyroid extract added — and the 綱目 arrived at it in the sixteenth century by the reasoning quoted at the foot of the leaf: 醎能軟堅, salty drugs soften what is hard. The 靨 is the point on which the leaf is both right and wrong. The gloss the Bogam carries says the glands are the animals' testicles, which they are not; the accurate description of the same organ stands two heads further on, in 神效開結散. Whoever wrote the gloss had never seen the dissection, and whoever wrote 神效開結散 had. The prescription works through the organ the gloss misnames. None of which makes it safe to prepare. **Thyroid glands of pig and sheep contain thyroid hormone in an unmeasured dose, and an unmeasured dose causes thyrotoxicosis — palpitation, tremor, weight loss, atrial fibrillation and, in the old thyroid-extract era, deaths. Large iodine loads can also tip a nodular goitre into hyperthyroidism or shut a thyroid down. Raw animal glandular tissue carries an infection risk besides. This must not be prepared.** A goitre today is assessed with thyroid function tests, antibodies and an ultrasound, and treated with iodised salt where deficiency is the cause and with levothyroxine at a measured dose where the gland has failed. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.