Cool the Fright Pill

The 熱 member of the triad — hot, cool it. A nyang of coptis with gentian and indigo behind it is as plainly bitter-cold as the tradition gets, and the wind drug and the three aromatics are there to open rather than to cool. Ten or twenty millet-grain pills is a child's dose by count, which is the only way the chapter ever counts. **Contains ox gallstone and musk, one ja of each, given to a child with no dose by weight stated. This must not be prepared.** Musk is from a CITES Appendix I deer and the demand this tradition created is why the musk deer are endangered; ox gallstone is a scarce animal material whose active content is unmeasurable, and most of what is sold as it is not it. The cooling drugs themselves are the least alarming composition in the batch — coptis, gentian, indigo and saposhnikovia are not mercury — but see Igyeong-hwan on what a febrile seizure actually needs, which is nothing. Of the three, this is the one that comes nearest to a defensible intention. A hot, irritable child with a high fever will be more comfortable cooled, and bitter-cold medicinals were the only antipyretic available. They are not one. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.