Ephedra Decoction for the Pox That Turns Back

Ephedra alone, five don of it, nodes stripped, boiled hard and skimmed and reduced by a third and drunk hot. The thinking is direct: the pox has gone back in, so force the exterior open and it must come out again. Ephedra is the strongest exterior-opening drug this tradition has, and giving it alone, undamped by cinnamon twig or licorice, is giving it for that one effect and nothing else. Skimming the froth and discarding the nodes are both from the old pharmacopoeia and both are meant to make it less harsh, which tells you how the drug was regarded. It would not have brought back a pox that had turned black. An eruption that fails to raise and darkens is bleeding into the skin, not a surface blocked from within, and sweating a child in that state removes fluid it cannot spare. 倒靨 — the pox failing to crust — was correctly read by this chapter as a grave sign; the inference that heat driven outward would reverse it was not. **Ephedra is the natural source of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, and this is five don, about 20 grams of the raw herb, decocted into a single dose for a child. Ephedrine raises heart rate and blood pressure and causes arrhythmias, and it has been banned from sale as a dietary supplement in several countries after deaths in healthy adults. The patient here is a small child who is critically ill and probably volume-depleted, and nothing in the leaf is measured against the child’s weight. This must not be prepared.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.