Serin Lee
Korean Medicine Physician
A quieter way
back to balance
Serin Lee is a Korean medicine physician in Seoul, working with patients somewhere between pain, sleep, and the rhythm of a day. She writes and draws so that an explanation given in the room survives past the door.
Clinic
The first step of care
is to help someone heal
Through pain, sleeplessness, and long-misaligned rhythm, the first task is clear. So a visit begins less with a list of symptoms than with how a day actually moves—because what the pain has made impossible is a more accurate goal than where it hurts.
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In the treatment room
She sees patients at a Korean medicine clinic in Seoul. Inside the room the work is needles and hands; outside it, sentences and drawings. She does not think of either as a different job.
FAQ
Common questions
Who is Serin Lee?
A Korean medicine physician who starts by listening to how a patient’s day goes. She graduated from Dongguk University College of Korean Medicine and now practices at a Korean medicine clinic in Seoul. Whether the complaint is pain or sleeplessness, she finds the thread more often in the shape of someone’s day than in a list of symptoms.
Where does she practice?
At a Korean medicine clinic in Seoul. Before that she worked mostly with international patients at Tongin Clinic, where she learned that good treatment can cross language but good explanation still needs it.
What does she write about?
An explanation given in the treatment room fades once someone steps outside. Writing is how she makes it last a little longer—notes, columns, and interviews on pain, sleep, and the rhythm of a day, published in four languages.
Why did she take up research?
The more often she used a treatment in clinic, the more she wanted to know how far the evidence had actually come. Her 2022 first-author paper in Frontiers in Immunology followed that question. The findings were still at the animal-model stage, and saying so plainly in the conclusion is where her habit of separating what is certain from what is not began.
What does she hope the books do?
Keep a hand from landing in the wrong place. She co-wrote the clinical manuals on long-needle, thread-embedding, and cosmetic acupuncture with colleagues—half of that work is really about what not to do. For the health books for young readers she drew the illustrations, looking for a line that makes questions about the body carry no shame.
What does she do outside the clinic?
She has worked where Korean medicine is practiced away from a treatment room—senior health promotion programs, the clinic at a national scouting jamboree. Those settings keep teaching her that when the audience changes, the length and order of an explanation have to change with it.