Health Blog
Written by Dr. Heo Ji-young. Each piece takes a single symptom and follows what is actually happening in the body.
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.
The Body Always Builds and Takes Down at the Same Time
Bone spends a lifetime being taken down and rebuilt. While we grow, building runs ahead; with age, taking down runs a little ahead. Growth and ageing are not different jobs but two directions of the same one.
After a Meal You Are a Slightly Different Body
After eating, a great deal of blood is sent to the abdomen, and the body puts the rest a little further back for a while. Tests are usually taken fasting, and much of the day is spent after a meal.
Lying Down Changes the Breath
Lying down lets the abdominal contents push the diaphragm upward, so less air remains in the lungs after breathing out. Feeling fine by day and tight once you lie down owes something to posture.
The Store Runs Down First; the Blood Shows It Later
With iron, the store runs down first and the blood changes later. So haemoglobin can be normal while the reserve is nearly gone. Medicine built a separate test to see that place.
Oxygen Is Not the Same Everywhere in the Body
The oxygen saturation read at a fingertip is the value of blood that has just left the lungs. By the time oxygen reaches tissue it is far lower, and it differs from place to place. Cartilage, for one, is meant to be low.
Bone Ages Differently in Different Places
A bone density scan measures the spine and the hip separately, and those values often disagree. It is the result of bone having lived under a different share of load in each place.
An Average Does Not Know the Place
A test gathers the body into a single value. Yet the same substance sits differently in the blood than it does stored in tissue, and symptoms arise in one particular place. A normal value and a sound place are not the same statement.