Five Aromatics Forsythia Decoction

The five aromatics of the name are aquilaria, agastache, aucklandia, clove and musk, and they are what distinguishes this leaf from the rest of the draining group. The chapter's two other 五香 prescriptions, Ohyang-san and Ohyang-tang, are built on the same five. The logic is that a bound swelling is bound qi, and that aromatic, moving drugs will open it — which is why the formula is pointed at scrofula and bound nodes as much as at abscess, the one group in the chapter that does not suppurate freely. It is nonetheless on the draining side of the chapter's central pair, and the method leaf puts it there explicitly: when an abscess first effuses in a repleted patient, hurry to give Ohyangyeongyo-tang or Cheongeumnuro-tang; in the young and robust, Oridaehwang-tang or Hwadok-dan, to get one or two free movements. Set against that are the 托裏 and 內托 formulas for the depleted patient, which supply ginseng, astragalus and Korean angelica so the pus is thrust outward instead. Rhubarb leads here at 1 don with the rest level at 7 fun, and the dose instruction is the same 以利爲度 as in the other draining leaves — take it until the bowels move. **Contains musk, which comes from the gland of a CITES-protected deer.** The formula as written cannot be prepared from legal materials. Read as history, its interest is the aromatic approach to lymph node disease; read clinically, neither purging nor aromatics will resolve a suppurative lymphadenitis. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.