Why she keeps speaking Korean medicine outside the clinic

We met Dr. Serin Lee after Thursday’s clinic had closed. She graduated from Dongguk University College of Korean Medicine, treated international patients at Tongin Clinic, and now sees patients at a Korean medicine clinic in Seoul while writing and drawing. On paper it looks like several jobs. She calls it all one job.

There were two kinds of paper on her desk: a drawing of a shoulder made for a patient, and a manuscript in progress. Before we began she turned off all but one of the lights. It is the hour of the day when the eyes tire most, she said.

The conversation ran close to two hours. There were more places where she trailed off and started again than places where the answer came out clean.

Q. When you decided to become a Korean medicine physician, what did you expect?

Honestly, something very simple. I thought I only had to learn how to make people better. There is a diagnosis and there is a treatment, and I would be trained to connect the two accurately. As a student I believed that when the connection failed, it was because I had not learned enough yet.

Exams never break that belief. A question has an answer. That people do not work that way, I learned for the first time outside the exam paper.

Q. And once you started practicing?

The first year was the hardest. I examined by the book, needled as I had been taught, and some people did not get better. I had not made a mistake. Back then I assumed it was entirely a matter of my own skill—that a more accurate diagnosis or a better prescription would solve it.

But at some point it stopped adding up. Same diagnosis, same treatment, and one person improved while another stayed exactly where they were. If the difference is not inside the treatment, it is outside it. After that thought, my question changed.

Q. Changed how?

Instead of “what hurts,” I started asking “how does this person’s day go.” At first it felt like a digression that ate into the appointment. Now I think it is half of the work.

Here she stopped for a moment. She looked bothered that her own answer had come out too smooth. “There are still days when I don’t manage it,” she added.

Q. What does asking about a day actually involve?

When someone sleeps and wakes, and how the waking feels. How many times the alarm gets dismissed, whether the body is stiff on rising, when the first meal happens. Small things, but gathered together they draw the body’s rhythm quite clearly.

And I ask what the word “rest” means to that person. Lying down with a screen, doing nothing, and walking are completely different events for a body. More people than you would expect are exhausted while having lost the method of recovering.

Q. Has that question ever actually changed a treatment?

Someone came in unable to raise an arm properly. For weeks it improved and slipped back, and as I listened to how the days went, it turned out to worsen specifically on Thursdays. There was a deadline every Wednesday night. She lost that night’s sleep, and the shoulder locked up the next day.

Once we knew that, we moved the appointment. She came Thursday mornings, and we settled on exactly one thing she could do on Wednesday night. It did not get better because I needled more skillfully—it got better because we changed when the needle landed. I think this is the kind of thing Korean medicine is good at.

Q. And when asking all that still does not solve it?

That happens. More often than you would think.

There are two things I try not to do then. One is manufacturing a cause. Having an explanation is comfortable for the patient and for me, but inventing a reason that isn’t there sends the next round of treatment in the wrong direction. The other is holding on too long. If it needs imaging, or belongs to another specialty, the right thing is to say so.

It took me a long time to be able to say “I don’t know yet.” I thought the sentence would cost me trust. Now I think the opposite. When someone who can say they don’t know says that they do know, the words carry weight.

Q. When did writing and drawing become necessary?

I kept watching explanations dissolve outside the door. In the room people said they understood, and at the next visit it was, “how was I supposed to do that again?” It is not their fault. That is simply what speech does.

So I started looking for a form that stays. It began with drawing on paper for people, and that eventually became books. I don’t think of writing and drawing as promotion. It is closer to extending the shelf life of an explanation.

Q. What did you spend longest on in the book work?

What not to do. A long needle goes deep, so half of it is knowing what to avoid. At first that felt like a defensive way to write a book. It turned out to be the opposite. When the places to avoid are clear, you can be bolder everywhere else.

On the books for young readers I did the drawings, and there the hardest thing was tone. Draw accurately and it frightens; soften it and it stops being accurate. Warm enough that a child does not feel ashamed looking at their own body. That was a problem I had to solve with lines.

Q. Why did you take up research?

It bothered me that I used a treatment every day without knowing how far its evidence had come. Believing something works and knowing what has been confirmed are not the same thing. So I gathered the research on acupuncture in respiratory disease from the beginning, and that became the paper I published as first author in Frontiers in Immunology in 2022.

What I actually learned was not the finding but how to write a conclusion. The evidence was still at the animal-model stage, so it could not be allowed to read as though it had been confirmed in people. Getting that one sentence right took the longest of anything.

Q. Did the research change how you practice?

Honestly, it did not change the treatment. One paper does not move where a needle goes.

What changed was how I speak. I used to blur “this will help” and “this we should watch a while longer” together. I thought people were reassured by confidence. Now I think they are reassured by precision.

Q. What did the Tongin years leave with you?

I saw a lot of international patients. Because the language was different, it became obvious how loosely I had been explaining things. A sentence I could get away with in Korean would simply refuse to be translated. If the meaning is not exact, it cannot be carried over.

What I learned then is also why this archive opens in four languages. The questions were nearly identical regardless of language. If that is true, the answers should be prepared with the same precision.

Outside, the last staff member said goodbye and left. She looked toward the door for a moment, then sat back down. The next answer took longer to arrive.

Q. What is hardest right now?

Time. I said practicing, writing, and drawing are all one job, but a day has to be divided between them. There are stretches where it feels like none of them is getting enough.

The harder thing is something else: I have no way to check whether I am going in the right direction. With patients I can at least read a face. With writing or drawing, I cannot tell whether it arrived.

Q. How do you feel about building a personal page and publishing your notes?

I hesitated for a long time. There is a careful line around a clinician promoting themselves, and I am on the side that thinks the line is necessary.

So I set myself rules. Never write as though one treatment is universal. Never move one person’s course into everyone’s outcome. Never use fear. If you keep those three, what is left is only my own thinking and my own method. I decided that much could be public.

It still makes me uncomfortable sometimes. I think the day that discomfort disappears is the dangerous one.

Q. What kind of clinic do you want to build?

Less spectacle, more staying power—a place that stays beside someone and helps tune rhythm over time. Not a space that ends after one dramatic change, but one that accompanies the return of a body’s own pace.

Concretely, I want a structure where a first visit can take the time it needs. Doing the intake I described properly takes time, and that is the hardest condition to arrange. Good care comes down to how you allocate time.

Q. If you read this interview again in ten years, what do you think will embarrass you?

Probably the confident sentences. (laughs) Some of what I believe I know right now will turn out to be wrong.

But to find out later that I was wrong, I have to write it down now. Without a record, things shift quietly and you don’t even notice they changed. I think that is what a record is for.

Q. Finally—how do you keep your own balance?

I can’t claim to keep it well. But I hold on to two things: about ten minutes of saying nothing at all after clinic, and one drawing session a week.

Someone who talks to patients about rhythm isn’t convincing after losing their own. It doesn’t have to be perfect; knowing where to return is enough. For me that place is paper and a pen.

After the interview she tidied the drawing on her desk. It was the shoulder from earlier. She would use it again next week, she said. When you find yourself drawing the same picture over and over, it means many people need that explanation—and then it is time to make a book.