The Illness That Returns When You Stop the Medicine

"While I'm taking the medicine I'm fine, but about two months after I stop, it goes back to exactly the same."

There are people who say this. It is the same whether the medicine is herbal or conventional. And usually they ask this:

"Do I have to take it for the rest of my life?"

I consider this question very important. Because how I answer it lays bare exactly what kind of treatment I am doing.

What medicine does falls into two kinds

I have said this in another article. There are medicines that substitute for the body and medicines that wake the body up.

It is only natural that when you stop a substituting medicine, it returns. That medicine was doing, on the body's behalf, the work the body could not do. While it was doing that work, the body was not. So when it stops, things go back to where they were.

This does not mean the medicine is bad. It means that medicine is doing its job precisely. If blood pressure is dangerously high, there is no room to wait for the body to regulate itself. In that case, a substituting medicine is right.

The problem lies elsewhere. It is when the treatment was meant to wake the body up, and yet it still returns when stopped.

In that case, I see it this way

It was not that the medicine was insufficient. It was that the environment stayed the same.

As I said in another of my articles, medicine does not travel to the sore spot. Medicine circulates the whole body. It only behaves differently at that spot because the environment of the collapsed place has changed.

So even while the medicine makes that place comfortable, if the environment that collapsed it stays the same, the moment you stop the medicine, it collapses again.

It is like mopping a room where water is leaking. While you mop, the floor is dry. Put the mop down, and it gets wet again. It was not that the mop was insufficient.

What restores the environment

So as treatment nears its end, I ask this:

"Before this illness began, what had changed?"

Usually an answer comes.

• For years, sleep has not gone past five hours
• Sitting to work all day, and sitting in the evening too
• Meals are always rushed and irregular
• Never once having let go of the tension
• Having stopped using the body out of fear of the pain

These are the environment. They are things a medicine can press down for a while, but cannot restore.

But here a misunderstanding arises

"So in the end isn't this just talk about lifestyle habits?"

It is. But saying "exercise and don't get stressed" is different from telling you what to change and why.

This is what I want to say instead.

"You are not hurting now because of hardened tissue — you are hurting because of the posture and the hours that made that tissue harden."

"If you go to sleep late, your morning hormone curve drops. That is why the morning is hard, and why you feel clear-headed in the afternoon and again sleep late at night."

"If you don't move out of fear of the pain, the tissue that goes unused hardens more, and hurts more."

Only when you know what makes what does the will to change it arise. A vague recommendation changes nothing.

So treatment goes in two branches

What the medicine does is restore the place that has collapsed now. It changes the nature of hardened tissue, softens an agitated immune system, and calms a sensitized nerve.

What the patient does is not to collapse that place again.

Neither one alone will do.

With medicine alone, it returns the moment you stop. With only a change in lifestyle, the tissue that has already hardened and the nerve circuit that has already been amplified remain as they are. It takes too long to reverse, or it does not reverse.

Restore with medicine, protect with lifestyle. These two must meet for the medicine to be stopped.

Then when do you stop?

I judge it this way.

Does it hold when the medicine is reduced? I do not stop abruptly. I reduce a little at a time and watch whether the body holds that place on its own.

Does it hold as the seasons change? Some people harden again when it gets cold. You only know after getting through one full season.

Does it hold under stress? Being fine when at ease is different from holding up when a burden comes. That the body has gained some reserve means the latter.

When these three settle into place, the share the medicine was carrying grows smaller. Because it means the body is doing that work again.

But this much I must say

Not every illness becomes like that.

Some illnesses must be managed for life. Some tissues do not come back. Age does its work too.

And please do not read this article as saying to stop conventional medicine. Blood pressure medicine, diabetes medicine, thyroid medicine, and anticoagulants are preventing dangerous things. The decision to stop those medicines must be made with the doctor who prescribed them.

What I am saying is that in the places those medicines do not touch — sleep, digestion, tension, hardened tissue, sensitized nerves — let us reclaim the part the body can do on its own.

The two are not in a fight with each other.

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That hardened tissue and an amplified nerve circuit remain even after the original cause is gone is a widely accepted explanation. So is the fact that lifestyle changes the course of a chronic illness.

That said, exactly what herbal medicine does in this process, and how much, has not been sufficiently established in humans. And there are many illnesses I cannot help with.

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To the question "do I have to take it for life," this is how I mean to answer.

"That depends on the illness. But where it is a place that can be tapered, I will aim to taper it."

The body holding on its own to the place the medicine restored — where that is possible, that is the place I set as my goal.

References

• A symptomatic effect shifts the natural-history curve in parallel, so stopping the drug lets it wash out and rejoin the original curve; changing the rate of progression itself is what disease modification means — Translational and Clinical Pharmacology, 2019
• A mechanistic review of how chronic pain is sustained by neuroinflammation and central sensitisation after the initial injury has settled — Anesthesiology, 2018

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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)