Health Blog
Written by Dr. Heo Ji-young. Each piece takes a single symptom and follows what is actually happening in the body.
Pushing Harder Makes the Body Shrink Back
A day spent finishing all the kimchi-making at once — for some people it marks the start of the body building itself back up, and for others it marks the start of a long stretch of suffering. Why? A moderate stimulus raises the body's capacity to adapt, but past a certain line the direction reverses, and that line moves depending on age, sleep, and recent illness. Chest tightness during exertion that eases with rest, and cola-colored urine after pushing hard, both call for same-day checking first.
Diagnoses Multiply, but the Body Is One
Three circles on this month's calendar — one for the knee, one for the stomach, one for dizziness. Do the signals the body sends increase along with the number of names? They overlap instead. Low energy, poor appetite, and a slowed gait are not words that belong to only one disease. There is only one question to ask — do the names already attached explain every symptom that is currently there? If confusion sets in over a few days, or a symptom you have always had changes shape, checking comes first.
Quelling Inflammation Is Not the Same as Resolving It
The splinter came out on the first day, so why does it take a few more days for the spot to settle down? The word “settling” actually covers two different paths — pressing down on what has been switched on, and the body sending a separate signal to bring things to a close. If what could not be cleared away is left behind, it becomes an alarm again, running on at low intensity for a long time. If fever continues, or a joint is swollen and inflammatory markers are high, testing to find the cause comes first.
What Remains After It Heals
The cast came off, but you cannot make a full fist, and the bone is said to have healed well, yet the arm feels heavy by evening — which is right? Both are. What a test measures is whether it has been fixed; what the body measures is whether it can be used the way it once was. Being told the bone has healed is the starting line for using it again, not the finish line. If the pain has moved away from the site of the injury, or you cannot bear weight on it, or it looks different in shape, checking comes first.
Flare-Ups Also Have Their Reasons
It flares up two or three times a year — but do those two or three times really come at random? For some, it is around when the first cold wind blows; for others, it is near the end of the monsoon; for others, it is three or four days after a stretch of packed workweeks. There is a pattern that does not show up in a single episode but only becomes visible after several — and the one to compare against is not someone else, but yourself last time. If it comes in a different shape than usual, checking comes before establishing a pattern.
When Guarding Becomes the Illness
When one molar aches, you start chewing on the other side without ever deciding to. Once the ache settles, you go back to normal before you notice. But in some bodies, those few days become years. The body does its part when it uses an injured spot less and shifts the load elsewhere to protect it — but what happens when the reason to guard it is gone, yet only the manner of guarding remains? If one limb visibly thickens within a few days, or a numb area keeps spreading, checking comes first.
A Body Long Ill Recovers Long
A patient who told me it had been three years then asked, ‘So will it take three years to heal, too?’ Counted in days, that is how it sounds — but saying it has hurt for a long time also means the same thing has passed through that many times. A nerve connection strengthened by passing through many times has to pass through the opposite direction many times as well before it weakens. Direction is revealed not by the good days but by how low the bad days sink. If it only ever worsens, or wakes you at night, checking comes first.
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.
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.