寶鑑Bogam

Formulas · Warm the Interior 溫裏 · Uihak Immun (醫學入門)

Costus and Pinellia Pill for the Drooling Child

Mokhyangbanha-hwan

한글 목향반하환  ·  Pinyin Mu Xiang Ban Xia Wan

木香半夏丸

The leaf carries no 治 clause of its own; the indication comes from the section head, which assigns this formula to the cold drool — 冷涎者, 胃虛也, 宜用木香半夏丸 — against 通心飮 for the hot. 白薑 is the white, dried ginger and resolves to the 乾薑 entry, which is what 溫脾丹 writes in the same place.

Composition 構成

Total 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

  • Drool held at the chin — the dribbling child (滯頤)
  • Cold drool, the stomach vacuous (冷涎者, 胃虛也)
  • Spleen and stomach vacuous and cold, unable to govern the fluids (脾胃虛冷, 不能制其津液)

Biomedical correlates

  • Physiological drooling of infancy and teething
  • Sialorrhoea
  • Oral-motor incoordination

Source text 原文

Donguibogam 東醫寶鑑

木香ㆍ半夏麴ㆍ丁香 各五錢, 白薑ㆍ白朮ㆍ靑皮ㆍ陳皮 各二錢半. 右末, 蒸餠和丸麻子大, 米湯灌下. 《入門》

Translation

Costus, pinellia leaven and clove, 5 don each; dried ginger, atractylodes, green tangerine peel and aged tangerine peel, 2 don 5 pun each. Powder the above, bind it with steamed leavened bread into pills the size of a hemp seed, and pour them down in rice decoction. — Immun 入門 (Donguibogam · Soa)

Clinical commentary 臨床

Costus, pinellia leaven and clove at 5 don against dried ginger, atractylodes and the two tangerine peels at half that, bound with steamed bread into hemp-seed pills. Every drug in it is warming or aromatic and moving; there is nothing cold and nothing that acts on saliva directly. The section's logic is that drool is the spleen's fluid, that a cold and vacuous spleen cannot hold it, and that the answer is therefore to warm the spleen — 法當溫脾 — which is also the name of the other formula in the section. 灌下, poured down, is worth noticing: the child is not expected to take it willingly. Drooling in a small child is almost always normal. Saliva production rises in the first year while the swallowing and lip-closure that manage it lag behind, and teething adds to both the flow and the open mouth; most children are reliably dry somewhere around two, and a fair number not until three or four. It is a laundry problem, not a disease, and it needs no treatment. It becomes a clinical question when it persists well past the preschool years, or when it comes with anything else — delayed speech, a weak or asymmetric face, difficulty feeding, frequent choking. Then the issue is usually neurological rather than salivary: cerebral palsy and the other causes of poor oral-motor control, where the saliva is normal and the swallowing is not. The ordinary non-neurological causes are worth ruling out first, since they are easy to miss and easy to fix — a blocked nose, large adenoids or tonsils keeping the mouth open, dental or oral pain. The chapter's own 內經 citation, that tongue slackness with drool belongs to heat, is the nearest it comes to allowing that the problem might not be the stomach. **Contains pinellia, which is toxic raw, in a medicine poured into a small child, and the text gives no dose by weight here.** 半夏麴 is pinellia worked into a fermented leaven, which is the processed form and the tradition's own answer to the problem; unprocessed pinellia is a severe irritant to the mouth and throat and can swell the airway, which in an infant is an emergency. The amount in a hemp-seed pill is unmeasured either way. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.

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