Bone-Setting Purple Gold Elixir

A fracture powder for the worst case: not the broken bone alone, but the broken bone with fever and loss of consciousness, which the chapter reads as static Blood having risen and attacked the Heart. Ground beetle leads it, with pyrite and drynaria for the bone, dragon's blood, the angelica tail, frankincense and myrrh to move the Blood, and rhubarb to drive it out below. Borax is the odd drug here, and probably in for its reputation as a resolver of toxin. The dose is remarkably small — 8 ri, under half a gram — which suggests the compiler was wary of it. The presentation described is where the honest reading has to be firm. Fever, fainting and collapse in the hours after a major fracture is blood loss into the thigh or pelvis, or fat embolism from the marrow, and both are emergencies of volume and oxygen. Rhubarb purges; a patient who is already losing circulating volume cannot spare fluid into the bowel, and hot wine on top of it widens the vessels further. The chapter's instinct to get the trapped Blood out is exactly inverted in this case. Pyrite and drynaria, meanwhile, do nothing for the bone; the bone is held by splinting, which the 夾骨法 leaf of this chapter describes. **Contains borax (鵬砂), which is toxic when swallowed, and rhubarb (大黃), a purgative given here to a patient who may be bleeding internally. This must not be prepared.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.