Settle Fright Powder

Three drugs, no weights at all — 各少許, a little of each — thinned with sow's milk and wiped into a newborn's mouth to be swallowed. Of the six night-crying formulas this is the one named for what it is meant to do: 鎭驚, settle the fright. It is also the one that gives a mercury salt to an infant with no measure of any kind. Crying at night in an otherwise well, growing baby is infantile colic: it begins in the first weeks, peaks at about six weeks, is worst in the evening, and resolves by three or four months whatever is done. Nothing treats it reliably. A sedating mineral given nightly to a crying baby, by a formula whose own instruction for the dose is "a little", is the worst risk-benefit ratio in this part of the chapter. If the powder quietens the child, that is the point to be most alarmed by, not reassured: a quieter baby after a mercury and musk powder is a sedated baby. **Contains cinnabar, which is mercuric sulfide — mercury. There is no safe dose at any age, the developing nervous system is the organ at risk, and the injury does not reverse. It also contains musk, from a CITES Appendix I deer, which has no useful pharmacological action; the demand this tradition created is why the musk deer are endangered. The patient is a newborn, the dose is given only as "a little", and the text gives no dose by weight anywhere. This must not be prepared.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.