Divinely Effective Interior-Supporting Powder

Four drugs, and the smallest of the 托裏 formulas in the section. 黃芪 and 當歸 supplement qi and blood so that pus is pushed up and out rather than left to burrow inward, 忍冬草 at the same weight as the 黃芪 carries the heat-toxin half of the claim, and 甘草 harmonises. It is the 托裏 principle at its plainest, and the wine in the decoction is there to drive the whole thing to the surface. Read it against the draining formulas of the same chapter — 內疏黃連湯, 五利大黃湯, 千金漏蘆湯 — which take the opposite route and move the toxin downward through the bowel. The 寶鑑 sets the two groups side by side and chooses between them by whether the patient's strength is holding. The honest modern reading is that a supplementing decoction does not treat a bacterial abscess; drainage and antibiotics do. What survives is the clinical observation behind it, which is accurate enough: a depleted patient localises and expels an infection badly, and an abscess in someone malnourished or diabetic behaves exactly as this chapter describes. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.