Health Blog
Written by Dr. Heo Ji-young. Each piece takes a single symptom and follows what is actually happening in the body.
If Your Child Is Urinating Often and Drinking a Lot
When frequent urination and increased thirst appear together in a child, do not first assume they are due to habit or stress. If weight loss or severe fatigue is also present, same-day evaluation for childhood diabetes may be needed.
A Child's Body Still Has a Narrow Range
Why does a child go so limp after missing just one meal? A child's body is not a miniature adult's — it stores less, draws it down faster, and its greater surface area means it dries out sooner. This is not malingering; the range the body can tolerate is simply still narrow. And for the same reason, recovery comes just as fast. For a fever (100.4°F/38°C or higher) in an infant under three months old, or when a child is limp and cannot make eye contact, a pediatrician or the emergency room comes first.
Why the Stomach Only Hurts Before School
Saturday mornings do not hurt, but Monday mornings the stomach hurts, and if the child leaves school early it settles down by lunchtime — is this malingering? A body that does not show up on tests is different from a body that is not hurting. When the same morning repeats itself, the hour the pain begins keeps moving earlier. If a child talks about wanting to die, or shows signs of self-harm, everything else comes second — call the Suicide Prevention Hotline at 109 right away.
Why Herbal Medicine for a Child's Cold
A cold gets better on its own — so why bring up herbal medicine at all? What is hard for parents is usually not the cold itself but what comes after: the fever breaks but the cough lingers, the child stays listless, and before they are fully back to themselves, they catch another one. Inflammation has a separate signal for switching on and a separate signal for winding down, and what I look at is that winding-down. A fever above 102.2°F/39°C, or a cold that has not improved after ten days, calls for a pediatrician first.
The Child Who Will Not Eat, the Child Who Will Not Grow
A child who starts pushing the bowl away once they pass their first birthday — can they really grow well when they are eating like this? The two worries arrive in a single sentence, but they are not the same question. It is not that eating less makes them grow less; rather, growth slows down first, and appetite falls along with it. The answer lies not in a single meal but in the growth curve. If a child struggles to swallow, vomits repeatedly, or is losing weight, that calls for a separate check first.
In Puberty, the New Things Arrive on Their Own Schedules
Acne, a new smell to the laundry, a few days of cramps every month — why do so many new things that were not there a year or two ago all seem to arrive at once? In fact, they do not. The adrenal glands switch on years before the gonads do, and menstrual cramps tend to arrive a year or two after the first period, not with it. Puberty is not a single switch flipped all at once. If a tic begins suddenly together with other neurological symptoms, a pediatric neurologist comes first; if menstrual cramps are severe enough to keep a child home from school every month, a gynecologist comes first.
A Child's Sleep Differs From an Adult's
A baby who sleeps soundly in your arms but wakes the moment you set them down, and a teenager who cannot get up even after ten wake-up calls each morning — why are two such opposite-looking pictures actually the same story? The doorway into sleep, and the rules for when drowsiness arrives, are rebuilt at every age. It is not because you do not know how to lay the baby down, and it is not because the teenager is lazy. If snoring comes with breath-holding, or a child is listless during the day despite getting enough sleep, a sleep study comes first.