Spirit Resolving Decoction

The sign the formula is built on is a real one. The prodrome of smallpox was two to four days of high fever with prostration, severe headache and severe backache, and the backache was characteristic enough to be worth naming — a physician who had seen the disease would have heard a child complain of the loins before any spot appeared. The chapter notices it, places it in the fever stage where it belongs, and uses it as a staging sign. That is the observation doing its work. The theory on top of it is the Kidney correspondence: the loins belong to the Kidney, so pain there means the pox threatens to erupt on the Kidney channel, which in this chapter's prognostic scheme is the worst outcome — 歸腎變黑, the turn to black. Sweating it out early is meant to divert the eruption. It did not. Smallpox had no treatment at all; see gamipaedok-san-soa. The eruption went where it went, and the backache was a symptom of the viraemia rather than a signpost to be redirected. **Contains ephedra, a sympathomimetic, and the instruction is to cover the child warmly until a sweat comes and to repeat the dose if it does not. Forced sweating under covers in a child already febrile and prostrated loses fluid the child cannot spare, and fluid was the one thing that changed outcomes in this disease. The leaf weighs the drugs but gives no dose by the child's weight or age — one packet, and a second if the first does not sweat.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.