Cicada Flower Powder for Night Crying

One drug, and half of one drug at that. The lower half of the cast cicada shell stops the crying; the upper half brings it back. The leaf says so with admiration — 古人格物之妙如此, such was the subtlety of the ancients in the investigation of things — and that sentence is the most revealing in the section. It is a claim of a dose-response relationship within a single insect husk, and it cannot be true. What it records is a physician who gave the lower half to babies who were about to stop crying anyway, and the upper half to babies who were not. Crying at night in an otherwise well, growing baby is infantile colic: it begins in the first weeks, peaks at about six weeks, is worst in the evening, and resolves by three or four months whatever is done. A condition that reliably ends on its own will make any remedy look effective, and any control look inert, to anyone not counting. The powder itself is chitin and will do nothing. The wine is the one thing in it worth naming: **a little wine stirred into the vehicle means ethanol given to a newborn, which has no safe dose and is a real cause of hypoglycaemia and depressed consciousness in an infant. The text gives no dose by weight anywhere. This must not be prepared.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.