寶鑑Bogam

Formulas · Tonify Blood 補血 · Seui Deukhyobang (世醫得效方)

Cistanche Pill

Jongyong-won

한글 종용원  ·  Pinyin Cong Rong Yuan

蓯蓉元

The leaf gives no 治 clause of its own; the indication comes from the section head immediately above it — 髮不生者因稟受血氣不足不能榮於髮宜服蓯蓉元. The transcription writes 𠔥 for 兼 and the normalized form is printed. 胡粉 is read as white lead (basic lead carbonate) as the text writes it, and is not 膩粉, which is the alias of 輕粉, calomel.

Composition 構成

Total 180 g per packet (첩) · representative dosage — verify against source texts. Excludes 1 ingredient measured by count or used as a vehicle, shown as —.

Received this formula from your practitioner? Amounts shown here are classical reference values — granule and prepared products differ. Always follow your prescribed dosage and directions.

Actions 效能

Indications 主治

Pattern-based

  • Hair not growing, Blood and Qi received short at birth and not reaching the hair
  • Blood depletion in an infant with a bald or thinly haired scalp

Biomedical correlates

  • Historically used for failure of hair growth in a child
  • Recorded for historical reference only

Source text 原文

Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑

當歸ㆍ生乾地黃ㆍ肉蓯蓉ㆍ白芍藥 各一兩, 胡粉 五錢. 右爲末, 蜜丸黍米大, 每十丸黑豆湯呑下. 兼磨化二三十丸, 塗擦頭上. 《得效》

Translation

Korean angelica, raw rehmannia dried, cistanche and white peony, 1 nyang each; white lead, 5 don. Powder them and make honey pills the size of a millet grain; swallow ten pills at a time down in black soybean decoction. At the same time grind up twenty or thirty pills and rub the paste onto the head. — Seui Deukhyobang 得效 (Donguibogam · Soa)

Clinical commentary 臨床

**Contains 胡粉, white lead — basic lead carbonate — 5 don of it in the batch, in pills swallowed ten at a time by a baby and simultaneously ground into a paste and rubbed into the baby's scalp. There is no safe level of lead exposure in a child. The patient is an infant, the text gives no dose by weight here, and this must not be prepared.** Lead is absorbed far more completely by a young gut than an adult one, crosses into the developing brain, and causes irreversible loss of cognitive function, with no threshold below which that stops being true; at higher exposures it causes anaemia, colic and encephalopathy. Both routes used here deliver it — the swallowed pill and the paste on a scalp that is being rubbed. White lead was used as a cosmetic whitener for centuries and poisoned the people who wore it, and that cosmetic use is almost certainly why it is in a formula about the appearance of the head. Under the lead the formula is 四物湯 without the cnidium, plus cistanche: angelica, rehmannia and peony to build Blood, cistanche to warm the Kidney. That is the tradition's coherent answer to 髮不生 — the hair is the surplus of the Blood, so fill the Blood — and in itself it is a harmless tonic. **髮不生 and 齒不生 are not two complaints, and together with 解顱 and 龜背龜胷 they are one disease: rickets, vitamin D deficiency.** The full statement is written at 三神散 in 解顱, the first of the sections, and it applies in full here. Delayed teeth is one of the classical signs, and the chapter has it in the very next leaf (芎黃散) while reading it as marrow not filling the bone. What it has no way of seeing is that a single cheap nutrient explains the skull, the teeth, the ribs, the legs and the late walking at once. Thin or absent hair in an infant has its own ordinary and usually harmless causes besides — the newborn's hair is shed in the first months and comes back, and friction on the back of the head from lying down produces a bald patch that resolves by itself. Where it is genuinely abnormal, hypothyroidism, iron deficiency, severe malnutrition and the inherited ectodermal dysplasias are what it points to, and none of them is reached by a lead paste. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.

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