Prof. Seungho Baek's Medical Insight

The Korean word for depression, ueul, is built from “worry” and “stagnation” — worry and sorrow that have stalled the body’s Qi. Read that way, the single most important move in lifting low mood is, almost literally, to move. Here is why running breaks the loop, and how to begin — alongside, not instead of, proper care.

The Stoics read emotion as Event, Judgement, Reaction — and Korean medicine maps almost the same sequence onto three organs. The Heart feels the first instinctive surge, the Gallbladder inserts judgment, and the Liver carries out the response. Knowing this is a quietly practical tool for staying calm under pressure.

Korean medicine counts not only overwork but its opposite — harm from idleness — among the causes of disease. Once an affliction of leisured aristocrats, the “disease of idleness” has become common in our abundant, sedentary age, and it weighs on the gut above all. This is why digestive disorders keep rising.

Whatever your constitution, two plain things matter most to the stomach and intestine: a stretch of empty time, and moving your body. Korean medicine ties the gut to the limbs so closely that a sedentary life reads, to the body, as famine — which is much of why digestive and metabolic disease keep rising.

A bad bout of indigestion can bring on a fierce headache — frightening, but usually it eases the moment digestion resumes. Korean medicine reads it as stomach heat rising to the head, and modern science as the gut–brain axis. Here is why it happens, why a painkiller can settle both at once, and why not to lean on one.

Korean medicine speaks of people with a “cold, weak stomach” — yet their stomach acid is just as strong as anyone’s. So “cold” cannot mean the acid has cooled. It means the stomach’s vitality has dropped — and, confusingly, such a stomach can run cold or hot.

After cold and hot, Korean medicine reads constipation along a second axis: too much energy or too little. Stagnant-Qi constipation comes when pent-up energy jams in the liver and stalls the bowel — the classic stress constipation; deficient-Qi constipation comes when there is no energy left to move it at all.

In Korea, “damjeok” is marketed as a stone-hard lump on the stomach you must remove — and it frightens people. But most phlegm accumulation is not a mass at all; it is a functional disorder that merely feels solid. Here is what damjeok really is, how it differs from a true tumor, and what actually resolves it.

Korean medicine sorts constipation many ways, but the first and most useful cut is between cold and hot. A cold bowel is sluggish and needs warming; a hot, dry bowel needs cooling. Treat one as if it were the other and you make it worse — here is how to tell them apart.

Modern science talks about the gut–brain axis; Korean medicine has long held that the stomach is hot and the large intestine cold, and that managing each against its own tendency — cooling the stomach, warming the large intestine — keeps digestion, and mood, in order.