Penetrate the Flesh Decoction

Three drugs in equal weight with fifty grains of glutinous rice: arnebia and cimicifuga to bring the eruption out, white peony to hold the blood while they do it, the rice to soften the decoction. It is 化毒湯 with white peony in place of licorice and all three drugs raised to a don, and the name states the whole therapeutic theory of the section — 透肌, to penetrate the flesh, meaning to carry the poison out through the skin from inside. The theory is coherent and it is wrong. **There was no obstruction to overcome.** The eruption of smallpox appeared where and when the virus reached the dermal capillaries, two to four days after the fever began, and it appeared in the number the infection dictated. A rash that seemed slow was either early, or the flat type that never raised at all, and the second of those was a near-fatal variant rather than a blockage. Giving a penetrating decoction to a child whose lesions were failing to raise would have looked like treating the worst cases and would have been treating nothing. On smallpox having no treatment at all, see sodok-eum-soa. The caution that attaches to arnebia is on jacho-eum. **The patient is a child with smallpox, and the leaf gives drug weights but no dose scaled to the child's age or weight.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.