Most of the Asiatic folk medicines sold in San Francisco's Chinatown are harmless. Sliced deer horn and powdered tiger penis, which believers in mystical medicine take to increase virility, are unlikely to hurt anything but the buyer's pocketbook. Neither are any of the 58 listed ingredients of another Chinatown favorite for aches and pains: ginseng rejuvenating pills, which are made in Hong Kong and contain such exotica as male mouse droppings, silkworm, rhinoceros horn, amber, turtle shell and myrrh. But this ancient Oriental panacea also contains an unlisted substance: the powerful Western painkiller...
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