Mume Plum Decoction (Children, Pox Thirst)

A hop each of black soybean and mung bean with three mume plums, boiled and drunk. It is the plainest formula in the three thirst leaves, and of the three it comes closest to what the child actually needed. What a bean water is, materially, is water with a little carbohydrate and a useful amount of potassium leached out of the beans, and mume makes it sour enough that a dry child will keep drinking. Giving a thirsty child a palatable drink in volume is most of the intervention. What it does not contain is sodium, and sodium is the component that makes oral rehydration solution work — the sugar is there to carry salt across the gut wall, not for its own sake. A sodium-free drink taken in quantity by a child who is losing salt in his stool can push his serum sodium lower rather than correcting it. So this leaf is nearly right, by a route that has nothing to do with its own reasoning, and the missing ingredient is a pinch of table salt. The full statement is on the 玉露散 leaf of 1.43 吐瀉. **The patient is an infant and the leaf gives no dose scaled to age or weight. Mume is strongly acidic on a mouth already ulcerated by the pox, and whole beans must be strained out before the water is given to a baby.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.