Transform the Lump Pill

Sea hare egg mass wine-boiled at the head of a blood formula is the notable choice. The chapter holds at 1.6 that a lump in the centre is phlegm-rheum, on the right food accumulation, on the left blood — and this formula treats the last two together, with sparganium and curcuma for the accumulation and safflower, peach kernel and flying squirrel faeces for the blood. Taking it down with a decoction of white atractylodes is the section's standing caution in miniature: after the lump goes, supplement. Whetstone rock at 5 don is the ingredient worth pausing on. The section repeatedly describes its method as grinding a mass away — 磨積, as against 下積, driving it out — and the treatise at 1.8 says explicitly that the classics speak of transforming, dispersing, pushing and grinding accumulation but never of purging it down. Here that language stops being figurative: an abrasive stone is powdered and taken. Whether it does anything is another matter, but the reasoning is legible. **A new, hard or growing abdominal mass requires medical evaluation before it is treated as an accumulation.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.