Arisaema and Costus Powder

Four drugs and ginger, decocted and poured in again and again. It is the simplest formula in the section and the only one of them that is a decoction rather than a pill or a powder, and it carries no mercury — which makes it, by the standards of this chapter, the least harmful thing on the shelf. The signs it names are the seizure itself seen from outside: 搐搦, the twitching; 竄視, the eyes driven to one side; 涎潮, saliva pooling because a convulsing child does not swallow. The chapter reads the drool as the cause and arisaema and costus as the drugs that will carry it down and out, and takes the stool as proof that it has gone. What is actually happening is that the seizure ends — almost always on its own, in a febrile convulsion — and the child begins to swallow again. For the chronic kind of fright wind the statement of what the child needed is given with 雙金丸. **This formula contains 天南星, arisaema, which is toxic raw and is given here blast-fried; the processing is what makes it usable and cannot be verified in a finished packet. It contains two whole scorpions, whose venom is a neurotoxin and whose dose cannot be measured. The patient is a child and the text gives no dose by weight anywhere — the packet is poured in repeatedly until the bowel moves. This must not be prepared.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.