The Body Does Not Tilt All at Once

Checkup reports rarely stop at a single line that says "slightly."

Blood pressure, fasting blood sugar, and triglycerides are all a little high, and waist circumference has grown a little too. And yet none of them, on its own, is enough to call a disease.

The explanation ends in a single line: "It is not yet at the point of needing medication, so please manage it."

You are told to manage it, but it is not clear what exactly you are supposed to manage. Since no single item is clearly bad, there is nothing obvious to act on.

Looked at One at a Time, Everything Is Ambiguous

This is a characteristic of metabolic problems.

Pneumonia shows up clearly in one place, the lungs. A fracture is one bone. But metabolism does not collapse clearly in one place. Several places tilt a little, in the same direction, at once.

So if you take each item apart and look at it alone, all of them look ambiguous. None has crossed the line yet.

Taken apart, it is invisible. Placed side by side, it becomes visible.

So a Separate Threshold Was Set

Medicine has observed this for a long time.

So a separate standard was created that groups items such as blood pressure, blood sugar, lipids, and waist circumference and looks at them together. And that threshold is generally set lower than the line used to diagnose each disease individually.

In other words: none of them is a disease alone, but once several are present together, that is when it counts. This combined standard is called metabolic syndrome.

If you have heard the word "borderline" for several items on a checkup, what matters is not each item alone but the fact that several of them are present together.

Why Do Several Move Together

These items are not strangers to one another.

When fat inside the abdomen increases, the substances it releases affect both blood pressure and the way insulin works. And then blood sugar and lipids move together with them.

They overlap at the root, so they tilt together.

That does not mean, however, that fixing one place will automatically bring the rest along. Being entangled with one another is different from pulling one and having the rest follow.

And It Begins Before the Numbers Do

This is where things stand in what I see in the clinic.

This tilting begins long before it shows up in checkup numbers.

It begins around the time you grow older, your muscle mass declines, and digestion is not what it used to be. At that point no item has crossed the line yet. But the body is already tilting in that direction.

So if you have heard the word borderline at a checkup, it is something that has already been under way in your body for some time.

Not Tilting All at Once Is Also, in a Way, Fortunate

Not collapsing all at once also means that several points still remain.

If one place has already broken down completely, that one place is the only thing left to work on. But if several places have tilted only a little, there is room to take hold from any of them.

When Testing Comes First

If your weight has dropped unexpectedly, if thirst and urination have increased noticeably, or if your vision has blurred, this discussion does not come first for you. There is something else that needs to be checked first.

And if you are already taking medication, this discussion is not about that medication. Any adjustment is something to discuss with the doctor who prescribed it.

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When several items on a checkup report sit just slightly over the line, it is easy to read that as nothing at all, yet.

But once several of them tilt a little in the same direction, the story changes from there.

The body does not tilt all at once. That is why noticing it comes late. And for the same reason, the moment you notice it is not already too late. This continues into a discussion of looking first at fluctuation when blood sugar is at a borderline level.

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