Most Holy Life-Preserving Elixir

The same shelf as 保命丹 a few leaves above, with the proportions changed and the cinnabar moved to the outside of the pill: arisaema as the bulk of it, typhonium and saposhnikovia and gastrodia, cicada moult and stiffened silkworm, musk, and fourteen scorpions. Where 保命丹 is for the child who still has yang signs, this one widens the indication to 胎驚 and 天吊 as well — fright taken in the womb, and the convulsion in which the head and eyes are drawn upward. 胎驚 is the part that should be read carefully, because it means a seizure in a newborn, and that is a different and far more serious thing than a febrile convulsion in a toddler. A newborn who seizes has hypoxic-ischaemic injury, hypoglycaemia, hypocalcaemia, meningitis or an inborn metabolic disease until proven otherwise, and the diagnosis is made in hours with glucose, electrolytes, a lumbar puncture and imaging. A newborn also has roughly 250 ml of blood, an immature blood-brain barrier and kidneys that clear poorly, so the same pill that leaves an older child apparently unharmed is a far larger exposure. For the chronic fright wind the statement of what that child needed is given with 雙金丸. **This pill is coated with 朱砂, cinnabar, which is mercuric sulfide: the coating is the outside surface of the pill and dissolves first. It contains fourteen whole scorpions, whose venom is a neurotoxin and whose dose cannot be measured, 天南星, which is toxic raw, and 麝香, musk, from a CITES Appendix I deer. The patient is a child, and in 胎驚 a newborn, and the text gives no dose by weight anywhere — the pills are sized by eye to a paulownia seed. Mercury injures a developing nervous system irreversibly at doses that leave an adult unharmed. This must not be prepared.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.