Warm the Fright Pill

The 虛 member of the triad — depleted, warm it. The warming is nominal: four nyang of arisaema processed in ox bile, which is a cooling preparation of a hot drug, with bamboo silica, cinnabar, borneol and a little rouge. What makes it the depletion formula is the absence of a purgative rather than the presence of anything warm. The rouge is why it is also called the Pink Pill, and that is worth noticing for what it says about paediatric practice: the pill was coloured to be given to a child. **Contains cinnabar — 朱砂, mercuric sulfide — in a formula for a child, and the chapter gives no dose by weight anywhere. This must not be prepared.** The mercury paragraph under Jinsa-go-soa applies here in full. Arisaema is toxic raw; bile processing is a genuine step and does not make four nyang of it safe for an infant. A convulsing child who looks depleted rather than febrile is the harder case and the one the chapter was right to separate. The reason that child is convulsing is usually systemic — dehydration and electrolyte derangement, hypoglycaemia, hypocalcaemia, meningitis — and the thing that would save most of them is fluid and electrolyte replacement, which did not exist. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.