Five-Ingredient Unblocking Paste

Five fresh things — rehmannia root, ginger, scallion white, radish seed and snail flesh — pounded to a wet mash and banked a finger thick around the navel, the baby then held in the arms until it passes wind and stool. The logic is the chapter's own: the navel stands out and the belly is full, so something cool and moving is laid over the blockage to draw it down, and the endpoint, 下屁泄, is the blockage giving way. Scallion, ginger and radish seed are all moving drugs in that reading, and fresh rehmannia and snail are the cooling pair. Read against what 臍風 actually is, this is the most dangerous thing in the section, and for a reason that has nothing to do with poison. **A thick wet poultice of raw vegetable matter and raw snail flesh, held against the open umbilical wound of a newborn under a binder, is close to an ideal culture for the organism that causes the disease being treated.** It is warm, it is moist, it excludes air, and the snail flesh and the soil on the roots carry spores. *Clostridium tetani* is an obligate anaerobe that lives in earth and in gut flora; an occluded, macerated stump is what it requires. The chapter has correctly traced navel wind to the cut cord and then prescribed the thing most likely to cause it. Modern practice is the exact opposite — dry cord care, nothing applied, the stump kept clean, dry and open to the air, with 4% chlorhexidine where infection risk is high, and maternal tetanus toxoid in pregnancy as the real preventive. For the full statement, see the note on `heolcho-san-soa`. **This must not be prepared or applied.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.