Deer Antler Four Catties Pill

The 四斤 family — cistanche, achyranthes, quince and cuscuta as the four catties — with deer antler velvet, prepared rehmannia, gastrodia, eucommia and schisandra added, all in equal parts. It is a liver-and-kidney tonic of the standard kind, given here for a baby whose whole body is slack, the flesh scant and the skin loose. Thirty to fifty honey pills in warm wine or rice water. **鹿茸 is deer antler velvet: the immature growing antler of a deer, cut off while it is still soft and covered in living skin and blood vessels, then dried. It is cartilage, blood and keratin.** No controlled evidence supports it for muscle tone, strength or growth, and the animals it comes from — several deer species — sit in the protected and CITES-listed group this project flags, so the trade matters as well as the pharmacology. **The dose is thirty to fifty pills in warm wine, in a formula given to a child, and the text gives no dose by weight here — the drugs are in equal parts with no weight attached and the pill count is an adult's. This must not be prepared.** The wine is the immediate hazard: ethanol in an infant causes hypoglycaemia and central nervous depression at amounts that would not touch an adult. 身軟 — a baby with little muscle bulk and loose skin — is generalized hypotonia with poor nutrition, and it is the one presentation in this section where a tonic instinct points somewhere real, because the common causes are nutritional. **Rickets belongs here: the vitamin D deficiency reading is set out with the 解顱 leaves of 1.49, and the same deficiency lies behind 1.52 髮不生齒不生 and 1.53 龜背龜胷.** The others are cerebral palsy, **congenital hypothyroidism** — caught by the newborn blood-spot screen, corrected entirely by thyroxine, irreversible if missed — spinal muscular atrophy, and plain undernutrition. Feeding, vitamin D and a thyroid test do what nine drugs in equal parts cannot. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.