When your stomach rumbles and your hands and feet are cold, but the tests are normal

"My stomach keeps growling. It's embarrassing."

Some people come to me this way. They've had an endoscopy, an ultrasound, and blood tests. All normal. They come having been told "it seems like irritable bowel syndrome," or "it's nervous."

But when I examine these people, it's not just the stomach noise. Usually two other things are there along with it.

Their hands and feet are cold. And their belly is oddly hard.

I see these three things coming together as no coincidence.

Stomach noise is not a sound made from "too much"

The sound made in the gut comes when contents, gas, and liquid move together. The fact that there's a sound is itself normal. It means the gut is moving.

The problem is when that sound is unusually loud and frequent.

I don't read this as "the gut is active." Rather, I see this kind of sound as arising when the gut can't properly mix and push things along. A well-coordinated gut calmly pushes the contents downward. A gut whose coordination is broken pushes on one side and gets blocked on another, and the liquid and gas move separately, becoming noisy.

Let me go one step further here. For the gut to properly push the contents along, three things must line up.

One, enough digestive fluid must be secreted. If liquid is lacking, the contents thicken and don't push along well.
Two, the contractions of the gut muscle must follow in sequence. The autonomic nervous system coordinates this sequence.
Three, there must be a pressure rhythm inside the belly. Each time you breathe, the diaphragm descends and presses the inside of the belly regularly. This rhythm supports the gut's movement from behind.

Loud noise in the belly can be a signal that one of these three has gone out of line.

And so the belly is hard

When you feel the belly of these people, it isn't soft.

It's not a belly that has sagged from lack of energy — it's oddly taut and hard. Especially below the solar plexus and toward the flanks. The person hasn't tensed on purpose, yet it's always held that way.

When the belly is this stiff, two things get blocked.

The diaphragm can't descend fully. If below is hard, there's no room to descend. Then the breath becomes shallow, and the pressure rhythm inside the belly disappears. The force that was supporting the gut from behind is gone.

The space for the gut to move shrinks. Inside a stiffened wall, the gut can't properly expand and contract.

And when the breath becomes shallow, the belly gets stiffer. The loop closes.

Cold hands and feet are not a coincidence

Here is how I see the reason cold hands and feet come along with it.

When the body judges that resources are lacking, it sets priorities. The heart and brain come first. Digestion and the extremities get pushed back. This isn't the body malfunctioning — it's making the right judgment. (The misunderstanding behind "my body is cold")

So if your hands and feet are cold, digestion is hard, and the belly is stiff — I read this not as three symptoms but as one state showing itself in three places. The body as a whole has lost its slack and gone into a defensive posture.

That's why neither "gut medicine" alone nor "warming the body" alone resolves it well. It touches only one axis.

The order I follow in the clinic

First, I rule out the dangerous things. I've listed them below. This always comes first.

Next, I feel the belly. Where it's stiff, at what depth the resistance comes, and whether that spot moves along as you breathe.

I look at the breath. Whether the diaphragm actually descends. Whether it can't descend because the belly is stiff, or whether it's a habit of using the breath shallowly.

I look at eating and sleeping. Digestive fluid and the gut's rhythm are tied directly to sleep and the autonomic nervous system.

And I compose a prescription in the direction of restoring these several axes together. Releasing the stiff belly, making room for the breath to descend, and letting the coordination of digestive fluid and the gut return — I look at these at the same time. This is why I use herbal medicine. It's not about pressing one switch hard, but about acting on several conditions together to restore the environment that body is placed in. When the environment returns, the gut finds its own rhythm. (What herbal medicine actually does)

Cases where you should go to a hospital first

Among stomach noises and abdominal discomfort, there are things that must be checked first. Even if you have already been told your tests are normal, get examined again if your weight drops for no reason, if you pass bloody stool or black stool, if you keep throwing up what you have eaten, if pain wakes you from sleep at night, or if swallowing has become difficult. If the belly swells noticeably while neither gas nor stool passes, that is an emergency. So is abdominal pain accompanied by fever. And if your hands and feet get severely cold and turn white or blue in color, a vascular or rheumatic workup is needed.

The conditions that do not show up on a scan

To those who come back having been told "it's nervous," I don't say that statement is wrong. But I think it must not end there.

Not showing up on a test means the tissue isn't damaged — it does not mean nothing is happening. The conditions for the gut to move, the conditions for the breath to descend, the conditions for the body to regain its slack — these things don't get captured in a photo.

I look at those conditions that don't get captured. That is what I do.

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Written by Dr. Heo Ji-young (PhD in Korean Medicine Pathology, Kyung Hee University · former Research Professor of Herbology, Kyung Hee University)