Lesser Fright Pill

Seven drugs in a flour-paste pill, coated with four more. The core is cooling and aromatic — curcuma, coptis, gentian and mirabilite against heat, costus and agastache to move the stomach, gleditsia pod to break phlegm — and the one anti-convulsant claim rests on the three scorpions. The expensive coating is the part that was meant to be seen: realgar, cinnabar, musk and leaf of gold and silver on a pill the size of a paulownia seed. The condition is the acute febrile seizure, and the honest reading is that it did not need treating. A febrile seizure in an otherwise well child stops on its own, usually within a few minutes, and leaves nothing behind; two to five per cent of children have one. Nothing in this pill shortens a seizure and nothing needs to. What matters is the fever's cause — whether this is a simple viral fever or meningitis — and that is a question of examination, not of prescribing. **Contains cinnabar (mercuric sulfide) and realgar (arsenic sulfide) as the pill coating, and scorpion in the body of the pill. The patient is a child and the text gives no dose by weight anywhere — only "one or two pills". Mercury injures a developing nervous system irreversibly at exposures that leave an adult unharmed, inorganic arsenic is a poison and a carcinogen with no safe intake, and dried scorpion is a neurotoxic venom that cannot be standardised. This must not be prepared or given.** The musk is also a CITES Appendix I material taken from the musk deer, and the demand this tradition created is a reason the animal is endangered. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.