Health Blog
Written by Dr. Heo Ji-young. Each piece takes a single symptom and follows what is actually happening in the body.
Normal Is a Range
Many patients, right before standing up at the end of an explanation, ask the same question — ‘So why exactly does this medicine matter for my condition?’ Answering that means first explaining what normal actually is. The body does not hold a single number exactly in place; it rises and falls while staying within a range, and that range differs from person to person, from time to time, and keeps shifting. The issue is not the rising and falling itself but the strength of the return once it has moved outside that range. If the body has suddenly changed, testing comes first.
Where the Return Stalls
Palpitations, meals, chronic pain, menstruation and menopause, a child's body, an aging body, an illness that will not end — the branches were different, but where things came to a stop was always the same: somewhere on the road out and back. How much of that strength remains does not show on a good day; it shows on a bad day. So who is the first to know it, then? Not a test result — the person who lived through that day.
Why It Is Hard to Point Exactly at Where It Hurts
When I ask where it hurts, many people rub a broad area with the palm and say it is about here. It is because the signal coming up from inside the body and the signal coming up from the skin go into the same place in the spinal cord together. So the place that hurts and the place where the trouble is can fall out of line.
How the Body Knows It Is Thirsty
A dry mouth and craving water are not the same thing. The body measures the concentration and the volume of the blood to make thirst, and puts that thirst out first, before the water has even been absorbed into the body. There was a reason Korean medicine has long asked these two apart.
Blood Pressure, Blood Sugar and Weight Do Not Arrive Separately
The fat that gathers between the organs is not a storehouse but a tissue that keeps sending signals out. That is why three lines on a check-up sheet so often reach the borderline in the same year.
When the Barrier Loosens a Little
Most of the surface where the body meets the outside is not skin but the inside of the gut. What happens when that wall loosens slightly, and why tests stay quiet about it.
Cholesterol Rises in an Order
A lipid panel records how much cholesterol is in the blood, not how many particles carry it. When those two part company, the sheet still says normal.
Why I Look at Several Lines, Not One
Lay three years of check-up results side by side and something appears that a single sheet cannot show. No line has crossed its threshold, yet all three are drifting the same way.
Tests See a Still Frame; Symptoms Appear While Moving
The images are clean and the joint is still stiff. What a test sees well is shape, and much of our discomfort is not a matter of shape but of how the parts move.
The Wave One Breath Makes Through the Whole Body
The heart pushes blood out well but does not draw it back so well. Every breath makes a wave of pressure through the trunk, and that wave does work of its own.
To Exert Force You First Hold Your Breath
No one taught us to hold our breath just before lifting something heavy, and yet we do. The force comes from the limbs — so why the breath?
Pain Does Not Match the Size of the Injury
The same knock is nothing one day and unusually painful another. Pain is not a copy of the damage but a relay of it, and a relay can be turned up.