Ten-Ingredient Aloe Pill

The most purposeful of the general 疳 formulas, and the one whose purpose is worms. Three of its ten drugs are anthelmintics — Omphalia, elm-fruit paste and Carpesium fruit — with aloe to move the bowel, picrorhiza and coptis for the heat, costus root and indigo, ten cicada sloughs, and musk. It is named for the aloe and the aloe is doing a specific job: in the classical logic a purgative carries the dead worms out. **The three worm drugs are genuine anthelmintics and ascariasis is what they treat.** Carpesium fruit and Omphalia are real antiparasitics, and elm-fruit paste is the oldest of the three; the disease is common wherever children are malnourished, and a heavy worm burden takes calories a wasted child does not have and can obstruct the bowel outright. A single dose of albendazole or mebendazole now does the same work, at a measured dose, for a few cents. **An effective drug with no stated dose is still a hazard**, and this leaf gives none: twenty or thirty pills, no weight of child. **Contains aloe at 5 don, a stimulant laxative, in a pill given to a small child for 止瀉 — to check diarrhoea.** That is the plain contradiction in the formula, and it is a dangerous one: these children are already losing fluid to 疳瀉, and in an infant the volume that an adult would shrug off is a circulating-volume emergency. **The text gives no dose by weight anywhere in this chapter.** The musk is from a CITES Appendix I deer, and the demand this tradition created is why the musk deer are endangered; the pig bile is raw animal gall. On 疳 as childhood malnutrition and why none of these formulas is food, see 五疳保童元; the formula of this group that actually supplements is 肥兒丸, and the one that actually delivers calories is 疳積餠. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.