Snatch Back Life Powder (Injuries chapter)

Three drugs, all of them drastic, and the logic is single-minded: the injury has left blood sitting where it should not be, so drive it out below. Rhubarb and black morning-glory seed are the purgatives, two nyang each, and the leech is there to break the clot itself. The instruction to repeat the dose if nothing has happened in a few hours, and to keep going until foul blood appears, makes the endpoint explicit. The patient described — fallen from a height, crushed under timber or stone, in abdominal pain and passing neither stool nor urine — is one in whom this treatment is actively dangerous. That picture is a pelvic or abdominal injury with bleeding into the retroperitoneum, a urethral injury, or a paralytic ileus, and such a patient is often already hypovolaemic. Purging them removes more fluid they cannot spare, and the leech, whose saliva contains hirudin, is an anticoagulant given to someone who may be bleeding internally. The foul blood the prescriber is told to wait for would be a sign of harm, not of cure. **Contains leech as an internal drug and black morning-glory seed, a drastic purgative. This must not be prepared.** A patient who cannot pass urine after a crush injury needs imaging and a catheter, not a cathartic. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.