Health Blog
Written by Dr. Heo Ji-young. Each piece takes a single symptom and follows what is actually happening in the body.
A Child Who Eats Sweet Things Often Says Their Head Hurts
A child fond of sweet things saying their head hurts is not rare in the consulting room. I read it less as a matter of how high the blood sugar is than of how steeply it rises and falls.
Calcium Is Not Only for Bones
Calcium brings bone to mind, but it is also the signal a cell uses whenever it starts any work at all. When a door opens and calcium comes in, whatever that cell was already for switches on. So the same door opening brings about something different in each place.
Standing Still Is Work
A person takes gravity lengthwise. That weight is not held up by bone alone standing like a column — what pulls and what resists are woven together, a structure called tensegrity. And that weave carries on into the inside of the cell.
The Body Does Not Hold an Exact Number
It is easy to think the body works to hold a number steady, but across so many cells an exact setting is not possible in the first place. So the body reads direction and speed rather than value. Both blood sugar and blood pressure have a device that reads the speed.
A Child's Body Is Not a Scaled-Down Adult's
How many times a child's heart should beat to count as normal — even that reference table was for a long time something adults had guessed at. When it was actually measured, it differed. When I see a child, I see not a smaller adult but a body under different conditions.
Asleep in Your Arms, Awake the Moment You Put Them Down
Parents joke that their baby has a sensor on its back. But an infant's chest is not a small version of an adult's, and lying on the back genuinely makes the work of breathing harder. Waking up and not settling again appear to have different causes.
Water Does Not Move on Its Own
Water cannot set its own direction; it follows whatever pulls it. What the body does instead is keep separate doors for water to pass through, and decide how many of those doors to open. So swelling is less a matter of having too much water than of water having left the place where it belongs.
It Is Mealtime and I Do Not Feel Like Eating
I do not look at a lost appetite first as a matter of will or mood. Hunger is a signal that comes up when the stomach empties, so I begin with how fast the stomach is emptying.
The Same Body Behaves Differently Depending on the Hour
It itches only at night, it is stiff only in the morning, it burns after eating. People pin down the *when* very precisely. It is because the body does not run on one clock.
The First Thing the Body Does Is Not Repair
You would think the body sets straight to repair when you are hurt, but there is a step before it. Noticing. And that noticing is not only a report filed after the damage is done — it sometimes comes ahead and sometimes follows behind.
A Test Looks at the Body of That Moment
There are times when it did not hurt during the test and then hurt once you got home. That is no coincidence. A test looks at that moment, in that position, at that material. Symptoms arise at another moment, in another position, in another place.
A Calf Cramp Does Not Have Just One Cause
People say it is from not drinking enough, but studies comparing the blood of those who cramped and those who did not found no clear difference. I look at a cramp as something small happening inside a narrow compartment, and I look at three strands together — energy, pressure, and nerve.