Six-Ingredient Sparganium Pill

Six drugs in equal parts: the zedoary and sparganium pair roasted in ashes, the leaven and malt pair fried, and the two tangerine peels raw. It is 消食丸 with the cyperus and amomum taken out, and it is the gentlest formula in the section — nothing here is a purgative and nothing here is a mineral. For what 積癖 actually is and why a persistent abdominal mass in a child is an imaging question today, see 進食丸 (jinsik-hwan), where the differential for this batch is set out in full. The indication is worth reading twice, because the text has noticed something real: 未喫食小兒, a child not yet on solid food, with a mass in the abdomen. That is exactly the age band in which Wilms tumour and neuroblastoma present, and in which intussusception is commonest — the peak for intussusception is between three months and two years. The chapter's own reasoning is that the mass cannot be stagnant food if the child has eaten none, so it must be the milk; the modern reading is that a mass in a milk-fed infant is the one that most urgently needs ultrasound. Nothing in this pill is harmful, and that is its real danger: the harmless formula is the one that gets given for weeks. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.