Health Blog
Written by Dr. Heo Ji-young. Each piece takes a single symptom and follows what is actually happening in the body.
Why I Look at Movement Rather Than Shape
Put one hand on your belly and one on your chest and breathe. An X-ray shows the shape of your ribs well; it does not show how those ribs open as you breathe.
When the Spring-Back Slows
"I am not diabetic, so why is my body stiffening?" The same reaction that browns and hardens a crust of bread also happens inside us, very slowly, using time instead of heat.
A Stiffened Body and a Diminished One
"My first steps in the morning are awkward" splits into two different bodies once you ask a little more. One loosens as you walk; the other loses strength the more you walk.
What You Can Do Today
"Let us look again in three months." That three months is not an arbitrary interval — it is how long the test takes to accumulate a new record.
Why I Look at the Course, Not Today
At a second visit, the first thing I look for is not the state of that day but what has changed between the first visit and the second. Two points are needed before a direction appears.
Why I Ask When It Happens
After hearing where it hurts, I usually ask when it is worse — morning or evening, before eating or after, lying down or sitting. Those answers hold what a test sheet does not.
Breathing Tunes the Heart
A healthy heart does not beat at identical intervals like a clock. It quickens a little on the in-breath and slows on the out-breath, and each keeps correcting the other's timing.
Knowing What to Strike
What a vaccine contains is not strength but a face. When I look at immunity, I ask not how strong it is but whether it knows what to strike — and whether it stops in time.
When Symptoms Move from Year to Year
Two years ago digestion, last year headaches, this year shallow sleep — and every time the tests were fine. I do not count that as illness arriving several times.
Why I Look at What Is Between, Not at the Parts
Belly and breath. Gut and brain. Heart and autonomic nerves. Every one of them was a story about two things and what happens between them, not about one organ breaking down.
Why I Look at the Place Rather Than the Number
There is pain you can put a finger on and pain you have to rub with a palm. I ask people to point because the number is on paper and the body is here.
Getting Used to Heat and Getting Used to Cold Are One Job
The body does not bring out a new apparatus each season. It shifts the setting of the same one. That shift takes about ten days, and the trouble of a changing season usually falls in between.