Category: Health

Most of us treat chewing as a trivial first step of digestion. Korean Medicine’s classic texts saw it as a source of the body’s very energy — and modern research ties it to brain blood flow and cognition. Refined carbohydrates and liquid fructose quietly strip that benefit away by needing almost no chewing at all.

Sometimes a taste appears in the mouth when you have eaten nothing at all — bitter, sour, or sweet. Korean Medicine reads these as signals of imbalance among the five organs. A sweet taste on an empty stomach, in particular, points to heat in the spleen — and can be an early sign of a blood-sugar problem.

Reaching for food under stress is not simply a failure of willpower. Korean Medicine reads “false hunger” as a signal of imbalance — and traces it to a mismatch between the liver and the digestive organs that shows up in four distinct patterns, each with its own cravings.

GLP-1 weight-loss drugs put the pancreas into a kind of forced booster mode — squeezing out insulin as if you had just overeaten, even when almost no food has come in. Korean Medicine reads the resulting strain through one idea: overwork. Here is how to support the organ while you take them.

Lupus strikes women roughly ten times as often as men. That lopsided ratio is a clue, and Korean Traditional Medicine reads it through the lens of qi and blood — a physiological difference between the sexes that, in this framing, tilts women toward the pattern the disease seems to grow from.

An economic bubble and the body’s inflammation look like problems to be stamped out. Seen differently, both are the same thing: a surge of concentrated resources rushing to where a problem needs solving. Suppress either without understanding why it arose, and the real trouble only returns, larger.

We are taught to eat well when we are sick. But during an acute infection, eating the same as usual — or a little less — tends to serve recovery better than eating more, because digestion is work and overeating turns the body into friendly ground for microbes. How much less depends on your constitution.

Every autumn, cold dry air arrives and a wave of rhinitis with it. Korean medicine reads this through the guard qi (wei qi) at the body’s surface: the cold contracts it inward and thins the protection it gives. The reading points to a simple remedy — raise a sweat, keep warm afterward, and sleep enough.

We are told that comparing yourself to others is the start of unhappiness. Here is a different reading: used well, comparison is one of the most reliable ways to find your own talent and calling.

The Huangdi Neijing locates healing in a state of mind: yeomdam-heomu, jin-gi-jong-ji — when the mind is quiet and empty, the true qi follows. The same stillness holds both the secret of happiness and, in my reading, a kind of reverse aging: hold the brief calm after each problem and true qi gathers into essence (jing). Happiness begins with unhappiness, but renewal lives in the stillness that follows.