Prof. Seungho Baek's Medical Insight

The start of autumn arrives in the hottest weeks of the year — yet it is when the season’s direction turns inward. For Hepatonia and Cholecystonia, that turn matters more than the temperature.

Both Wood constitutions do well on meat. But Cholecystonia’s trouble usually starts in a cold, sluggish large intestine rather than an overheated liver — and for that, root vegetables do the more direct work.

Two Hepatonia eat the same unsuitable meal; one is fine, the other is ill for two days. Part of the answer is how steep the gap between their strongest and weakest organs has become.

Some people instinctively reach for what suits them. Others crave exactly what harms them. The body does send nutritional signals — but in a world of engineered food, pleasure and stress often shout louder.

The Water types are told to avoid raw food and are drawn to sweets. Both instincts have a real basis — and both go wrong in a predictable way. A classical formula and a twenty-minute trick explain how to get them right.

A Korean meal without soup barely counts as a meal. For some constitutions the broth is doing real work; for others it quietly gets in the way of digestion. The difference is in the stomach.

Barley tea, corn tea, hovenia tea, americano — plenty of people drink something other than water all day. Mild as they are, each has a character, and drunk by the litre it starts to matter which constitution you are.

Prof. Baek teaches pathology and runs laboratory research. Eight Constitution Medicine is not in the formal curriculum. So why do his writings lean on it so heavily? He gives four reasons.

Even the best hitter in baseball rarely bats .400. Medicine is similar: a single visit rarely cures, and a first constitutional diagnosis is right only about half the time. What separates good practitioners is what happens after a miss.