Health Blog
Written by Dr. Heo Ji-young. Each piece takes a single symptom and follows what is actually happening in the body.
A Painful Place Tilts Acidic
Some places hurt out of all proportion to the injury. Inflamed tissue, and tissue short of blood flow, tilts acidic — and the body carries channels on its sensory nerve endings that read that acidity directly. Acid-base is not waste left over from metabolism but a signal the body reads.
Being Tired Is When to Look After Yourself
In the clinic I tell people to take particular care when they are tired. Fatigue is not one signal but several different situations wearing the same face, and the body's defences loosen along with it. There is a reason shingles comes when you are worn out.
The Same Place Gives Way at Every Change of Season
What makes the turn of a season hard is not that it is cold or hot but that it changes quickly. The body's sensors respond less to temperature itself than to the rate at which it changes. And once regulation is kept busy, whichever place is thinnest in that person shows itself first.
Some Vessels in the Body Are Meant to Leak
When something swells or weeps clear fluid, it is easy to assume a vessel has burst or grown weak. But vessel walls differ in tightness from place to place, and even a tight vessel opens the gaps between its cells when the body calls for it. Swelling is less a wall giving way than a door being opened.
In Photographs, the Head Is Always Tilted to One Side
When the pelvis or the shoulders are twisted, the body makes its final adjustment at the head so that the eyes stay level. But the neck is unusually densely packed with sensors that measure position, so a head held tilted can send information that disagrees with what comes from the inner ear and the eyes. The place that holds posture and the place that reads how the body feels lie closer together than one might expect.
Measured One at a Time, Everything Is Normal
A test measures one thing at a time. That is what makes measurement possible. But the body does not tilt one thing at a time. When several sides lean a little in the same direction, each one measured separately still falls inside the normal range.
In Winter, the Same Work Weighs More
It is not that the body spends less energy because it is winter — on keeping warm it spends more. What it does instead is hold down the share it assigns to movement. Hibernation is the extreme form of that tendency; getting up later and moving less is the faint version of it.
Autumn Dryness Is Not a Shortage of Water
Wildfires come in autumn not because the sparks grow stronger but because what burns has dried out. Drying in the body is likewise less a shortage of water than reduced blood flow to the mucosa and secretions that have turned thick. Which is why drinking more water alone does not resolve it.
Summer Is Harder to Get Through Than Winter Now
For winter, clothing and heating settled the question of keeping warm. Summer is different: the hot, humid outside and the cold, dry air of the cooling sit inside a single day, a door apart. By the time the body has adjusted to one, the other arrives.
When Spring Brings Frequent Colds and Shallow Sleep
The daily clock the body set for winter has to be moved in spring. The suprachiasmatic nucleus, which does that work, shifts only a little each day. Meanwhile pollen thins the defence of the nasal lining, and a wide day-to-night temperature swing keeps the sympathetic nervous system switched on. Three things overlap, each in a different place.
What the Body Does When It Eats Less — I Was Sceptical for a Long Time
I was sceptical about intermittent fasting for a long time, because in the consulting room I often see what happens when blood sugar swings. Then, studying the cell side, another layer came into view. The two accounts sit on different layers.
Sometimes Rising Blood Pressure Is an Effort
For most high blood pressure no single cause can be named. Yet look at the cases where a cause is known and one grain runs through them: when less blood reaches somewhere, the body raises the pressure to make that up.