Ginseng Clear the Diaphragm Powder

Sixteen drugs in three dose tiers, about 11 g in one packet. The upper tier is white atractylodes, astragalus, aster, lycium root bark and talc; gypsum, platycodon and licorice sit below them; and eight more drugs, ginseng among them, take 1 fun each. The formula is named for ginseng and gives ginseng the smallest share in it — the heading drug here is not the main drug. 痰喘 is breathlessness, and in a child with smallpox it was pneumonia: variola pneumonitis in the second week of the illness, or a secondary bacterial pneumonia settling on top of it. Either killed, and together they were among the commonest proximate causes of death. The section's own prognostic signs are the right ones — a raised chest and a lost voice, and panting without phlegm in a child who cannot lie flat. Those are severe respiratory distress and orthopnoea, read straight off the patient. The sign a clinician watches for in a child today is the breathing itself: the rate, the chest wall drawing in below the ribs and between them, the grunt at the end of each breath, the head nodding with effort. And the chapter's reading of the complication as 毒攻肺, the toxin striking the lung, is descriptively where the disease actually went. As treatment this is a cooling lung formula and cannot touch a pneumonia. What treats a bacterial pneumonia in a child is an antibiotic and oxygen, and what treats the viral pneumonitis is supportive care and respiratory support. **Contains talc and gypsum, mineral powders decocted and given by mouth to an infant, and the leaf gives no dose scaled to age or weight.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.