Apart from teaching, most of Prof. Baek’s working time goes into laboratory research: taking an idea from Korean medical theory, turning it into a hypothesis, testing it experimentally, and writing it up as a scientific paper. In medical circles this is usually called making Korean medicine scientific, or objective. This article is about the scientific study of Korean medicine — what that phrase actually means, why it is harder than it sounds, and where the eight constitutions come in.
In Summary
- “Making Korean medicine scientific” is a phrase applicants recite at admission interviews. Few students, even enrolled ones, can say what it means.
- In the life sciences it usually means objectification: observing, under controlled time and space, phenomena that reproduce consistently.
- Living beings resist that. Time, space and energy cannot be held fixed in a person, and unobservable factors — mind, emotion — matter a great deal. So experiments retreat to cells in a dish.
- Beyond the technical problem there is a deeper one: the two systems start from different foundations. Natural science begins from the atom and physical law; East Asian medicine begins from qi, whose movement follows yin-yang and the five phases.
- Prof. Baek’s view after teaching both: both are right, both are necessary, and they connect — which is why exchange between them matters.
- The eight constitutions change the picture. Because they rest on a limited, standardised set of individual characteristics, experiments built on them can be reproducible and scientifically meaningful.
A Phrase Everyone Uses
“Making Korean medicine scientific” is, for people inside the field, a tired phrase. Sit on an admissions panel and you will hear it from candidate after candidate: if admitted, they will work to make Korean medicine scientific. Presumably the preparatory schools tell them to say it.
Ask what it means, though, and almost nobody can answer — including students already in the programme. So it is worth being precise.
What It Usually Means
Making something scientific generally means making it objective. In the biological sciences that means experimentally observing matter in a defined, fixed frame of time and space, and establishing phenomena that appear consistently.
Prof. Baek’s own characterisation is pointed: in his view the life sciences still operate largely within a materialist, classical-mechanical paradigm. That is one researcher’s reading of his own field, and a fair one to hold up for discussion.
The difficulty is that people, and living things generally, do not hold time, space, particles and energy fixed, and they are heavily shaped by domains we cannot yet observe — mind and emotion. Life is therefore very hard to make scientific in that sense. The practical response is to shrink the system: experiments are done on cells, in the tightly controlled environment of a culture dish.
The Deeper Problem: Different Foundations
Set the technical obstacles aside and there is a more basic reason why Korean medicine cannot simply become Western natural science: the founding theories differ.
- Natural science: the root of all things is the atom, and atoms follow the laws of physics.
- East Asian science: the root of all things is qi, and the movement of qi follows yin-yang and the five phases.
And modern life makes the second harder to grasp. Yin-yang and the five phases are felt by people who live observing nature and adapting to its changes — not easily by people who spend their days inside concrete and in front of a phone screen.
Prof. Baek describes his research as something like trying to explain an experience that exists only within one culture, in another culture’s language, to someone who has never lived it — and finding it harder even than that.
Both Are Right
This is not an argument for keeping the two apart. Having taught and studied both, Prof. Baek’s conclusion is that both bodies of knowledge are correct, both are needed, and they connect. For either to develop, exchange between them matters.
Where the Eight Constitutions Come In
The difficulty so far is that Korean medicine struggles to describe its phenomena in the language of science. The constitutional concept changes the situation.
Constitutional medicine works from a comparatively limited and standardised set of individual characteristics — eight arrangements rather than an open-ended description of each person. That makes experimental reproducibility much higher, and allows scientifically meaningful results to be drawn.
In other words, the feature that makes the eight constitutions look simple to critics is exactly what makes them testable. A system that sorts people into a small number of fixed categories can be put in front of an experiment in a way that a fully individualised clinical judgement cannot.
Looking Ahead
At present the two medical communities in Korea do not mix much. As each understands the other better, integrated treatment becomes possible.
Prof. Baek’s closing line in the original is characteristically wry: of everything with a “K” in front of it, Korean medicine is the field whose potential has not yet broken through — and he has no idea when it will.
Summary
Making Korean medicine scientific means making it objective and reproducible, which is hard for any living system and harder still for a medicine built on different first principles. The eight constitutions offer a way in: a small, fixed set of categories that experiments can actually test.
Related: Constitutional Medicine and Precision Medicine · Why Eight?
