Prof. Baek describes himself as healthy while admitting that some part of him hurts nearly every day. That is not a contradiction. It is a better definition of health.
Calorie Restriction and the Pancreotonia Constitution: Cool the Stomach, Don’t Cut the Food
Eating less is among the better-supported ways to slow aging. Applied to the constitution that eats a lot because its stomach runs hot, it can do the opposite of what is intended.
Jangha, the Fifth Season: What Korean Medicine Sees Between Summer and Autumn
The year has four seasons unless you count the way Korean medicine counts. There is a fifth, and its job is not to be a season so much as to turn one into another.
Starting a Constitutional Diet Without Failing: Seven Things the Chart Leaves Out
Work from an online chart, sorting everything into never and always, and you end up with nothing to eat and a lot of stress. The chart is prior information, not the answer — here are the seven things that turn it into a workable routine.
When a Water Type Runs Hot: Why Red Ginseng Can Make Things Worse
Renotonia and Vesicotonia are pictured as cold and easily tired. But plenty of them arrive sweating, headachy and sleepless — and giving them the warming foods the chart recommends pours fuel on a fire.
Avoid the Harmful or Seek the Beneficial? The Older Question in Constitutional Eating
Practitioners tend to stress avoidance, and for disease prevention they are right. But for survival, actively eating what suits you was always the more decisive thing — and thinking about why changes how you hold the whole practice.
Why Taste Is the Least Reliable of the Senses
The same herbal decoction tastes sweet to one patient and bitter to another. Taste answers to your internal state more than to what is in the bowl — which is why craving is not the same as needing.
The Year I Took Off the White Coat: What Being a Patient Taught Me
In 2025 I stopped treating myself and went round the clinics as a patient. Eighty percent better, by any objective measure — and still impatient about the twenty. That gap between what the doctor sees and what the patient feels is worth writing down.
Sweating Through Every Meal: What Your Stomach Is Telling You
Everyone sweats over hot food. Sweating heavily whenever you eat rice or anything spicy, while the people around you stay dry, points at something about your stomach — and there are three quite different versions of it.
What a Nosebleed Tells You: Heat With Somewhere to Go
Nosebleeds are treated as a sign of overwork, but overwork rarely produces one on its own. What it does indicate is heat — and in an otherwise healthy person, a nosebleed can be heat finding an exit.