Bone-Joining Elixir

A plaster, not a pill, whatever the 丹 in the name suggests. Six nyang of pine resin and 1 nyang 5 don of sesame oil are the body of it; the drug powders — 當歸 largest, then 川芎, 沒藥, 骨碎補, ember-roasted 川烏, three old coins calcined and quenched seven times, 乳香, 木香 — are worked into that base, spread on oiled paper and stuck over the site. 骨碎補 is in it for its name, which means exactly bone-shatter-mender. The claim 用此復續如初, use this and they join again as they were, belongs to the plaster and cannot be met by it. A resin-and-oil matrix on the skin holds a dressing in place and keeps a wound from drying; it does not carry 當歸 or pyrite-quenched copper to a fracture line centimetres below, and nothing applied to intact skin accelerates callus. What it could genuinely do is hold the limb's dressing and keep the area covered — and in 1.7's own sequence, where 骨碎者 are first glued with a bone-setting drug, splinted, then dressed externally, that is the role it is actually given. **Contains aconite, which is toxic — absorbed through broken skin as well as swallowed. This must not be prepared.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.