Rehmannia Powder for Pox Screens

The largest formula in the section and the only one with a shape to it: two rehmannias and angelica for the blood, the wind drugs ledebouriella and notopterygium, the eye set of cicada moulting, horsetail, pipewort and tribulus, rhinoceros horn and scrophularia for toxic heat, rhubarb to take the heat out through the stool, and akebia and licorice in small amounts to lead and to harmonise. It is the eye chapter's standard answer to a hot, red, screened eye, transmitted here in the Uihak Immun's recension, and the dose is tiny — 5 fun, two grams, in liver broth. What this section is treating, and what could and could not be done about it, is set out under Milmonghwa-san. The specific thing to grade here is the indication, because it is a good one. Red vessels rising into the cornea and a white membrane creeping over it, scattered and diffuse at the edges, easy; suddenly veiling the black of the eye, and it mostly ends in blindness. That is the distinction between peripheral vascularization with marginal infiltrates, which settles and leaves vision, and a central corneal ulcer or scar on the visual axis, which does not. A physician who sorted these children by where the opacity sat rather than by how much of it there was had found the thing that predicted the outcome, and nothing in this powder changed the outcome either way. **The patient is a child, and this leaf gives no dose scaled to age or weight — 5 fun, whatever the child's size. The rhinoceros horn is from a CITES Appendix I animal and is pharmacologically inert; the demand for it is why the rhinoceroses are nearly gone.** Rhubarb at a fourteenth of a 5-fun dose is not a purge, but it is a purgative given to a child who has just lost fluid through a confluent eruption, and fluid loss was among the things that actually killed these children. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.