Lee Moon-won
Lee Moon-won

“When did it start to change?”

It is the first thing I ask at a first consultation. The answers differ from country to country.

Among women who come from the Middle East, many tell me their hair changed after several childbirths. Young patients from highly competitive countries tell me it began to fall after nights of study or nights of work. Hair speaks the same language across borders. The reasons differ from country to country.

Ask a patient, “How was it this time last year?” and most will smile. It is the smile of not knowing. Few people can say clearly when they first noticed their hair thinning, or whether the itching came before the shedding. That is not strange. We look in the mirror every day, but we cannot see the difference between yesterday and today.

But those reasons do not show up in a single visit. They appear over time. And patients themselves cannot remember what their scalp was like last year. They forget when the itching began, in which season the hair fell more, what was happening in their lives that year. To prevent hair loss, one must know the changes that come before the disease. But no one remembers them.

Hair sends signals first. Strands grow thinner than before, the scalp becomes more sensitive, the amount that falls shifts with the seasons. The signals are too small to notice day by day. They can be read only when compared across months and years. A change that comes before the disease disappears if it is not recorded.

Korean medicine has an old ideal. The physician who treats a disease after it appears is lesser than the one who manages it before it becomes a disease. That ideal never became reality, not because the philosophy was lacking, but because there was no memory.

We are building that memory. The memory of one doctor has limits, so we let records accumulate in a system rather than in a single mind. Patients from 103 countries fill in the same intake form and are recorded with the same indicators, which lets us compare across borders. Conversation with the patient remains the most important source, because changes in daily life surface in talk before they surface in numbers. Training an artificial intelligence on these records is still under development. In time, these records may also become evidence.

Recording in the same format makes something possible for the first time. A woman from the Middle East whose hair changed after childbirth and a young patient whose hair began to fall after nights without sleep can be placed on the same line and compared. We can see, for the first time, which changes follow which life events, and whether patterns repeat across countries and cultures. Even the memory of a doctor who has practiced for 21 years cannot make that comparison.

The method is to record the state of the scalp at regular intervals and, when a change appears, to follow it with a conversation. Numbers alone cannot read a person’s life, and conversation alone cannot hold on to change. Only together do they become memory.

Memory comes from relationship. People tell the person they trust about their daily lives. Only when daily life is spoken can change be seen, and only when change is seen can a condition be managed before it becomes a disease.

This is not the work of one clinic. I believe it is a new method Korean medicine can offer the world: laying the most accurate records on top of the oldest tradition.

“When did it start to change?”

The era in which patients must answer that question from memory will soon end. The oldest medicine has begun to acquire the most accurate memory.

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Lee Moon-won

Lee Moon-won is chief doctor of Lee Moon Won Korean Medicine Clinic. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. — Ed.


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