Cinnabar and Rhinoceros Horn Powder

Three drugs and no vehicle but water: rhinoceros horn to cool the blood, cinnabar to weigh the spirit down, musk to open the orifices. It is the smallest and most expensive kind of emergency medicine in the book — a powder a practitioner would carry already made up, to be given to someone found collapsed with a clenched jaw. None of it works. Rhinoceros horn is keratin, the same protein as hair and fingernail, and has no pharmacological action of any kind; the belief that it does is what drove the trade that has brought every rhinoceros species to the edge, and the demand this tradition created is the reason they are endangered. Cinnabar is mercuric sulfide and musk is a glandular secretion taken from a hunted animal. The route of administration is the other problem. 調灌 — stirred and poured in — means poured into the mouth of a patient who is unresponsive with the jaw clenched. Someone in that state has no gag reflex, and liquid put into the mouth goes into the lungs. The airway comes first: in a collapsed patient the modern sequence is to check responsiveness and breathing, call for help, start chest compressions if there is no pulse, and give nothing by mouth until the patient can protect the airway. **Contains rhinoceros horn, a CITES Appendix I product banned from international trade, which is keratin with no pharmacological action; cinnabar, which is mercuric sulfide; and musk, from a CITES-protected animal. This must not be prepared or taken.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.