Between needles and sentences

When we made the long-needle book with colleagues, placement mattered more than ornate prose. I layered muscle, points, and home stretches so students and early clinicians would not lose where the hand should go. Safety and effect, I believed, begin with accurate spatial sense.

A long needle goes deep, and depth asks for caution. Half of that book became, in the end, a book about what not to do—where the structures to avoid are, what a slightly wrong angle meets. Once safety is written down first, the remaining space can be worked with confidence.

In editing I cut many sentences. I wanted instructions people could actually follow more than impressive phrasing—QR-linked movement clips, anatomical overlays on model photos, short cautions. After the book closed, I hoped the hands would still remember. Writing should become a clinical hand, not only a list of knowledge.

That was also when I began drawing myself. Photographs cannot show what lies beneath skin; text alone cannot fix an angle. A few added lines often solved both at once. The goal was never a beautiful drawing, only one that could not be misread.

On the health books for adolescents—Before You Turn Eleven and Before You Turn Fourteen—I worked as the illustrator. Where the text had stripped away the hard terms, the drawings had to show the body’s signals in their place: helping someone interpret “this hurts” without fear, in a form that belongs to daily life. It also becomes a guide families can reopen together.

Drawing those books taught me one more thing: young readers are remarkably curious about their bodies, and have remarkably few places to ask. Periods, growing pains, posture, sleep, weight—especially so. Often it was enough simply to offer accurate information in a tone that carries no shame. I learned then that the warmth of a single line is what sets that tone.

International patients taught me this as well: effect can cross borders, but reassurance needs language. Expectations and the words for sensation can differ even under the same treatment. That need for clearer speech became the habit of recording I keep now. It is also why this space opens in Korean, English, Chinese, and Japanese.

The research sits in the same place. The language of evidence had to be handled even more carefully than a needle. Writing up findings still at the animal-model stage as though they had been confirmed in people would not be a sentence—it would be closer to a misdiagnosis. Measuring the depth of a single line was just as necessary there.

The moment a needle meets the body and the moment a sentence meets a reader give me a similar tension. Too deep or too shallow fails. Excess rhetoric and insufficient steadiness both harm. Right depth, right direction, and a pace the other person can receive—that is the sense I try to keep.

Writing has a difficulty needling does not. In the room I can adjust my words while watching a face; a sentence arrives alone. So I reread. Whether this sentence would still be courteous in front of someone in pain, whether it frightens, whether it overstates.

There is also a list of things I have decided not to write: sentences that make one treatment sound universal, sentences that turn a single person’s experience into everyone’s outcome, sentences that use fear. The longer that list of unwritten lines grows, the longer I believe the writing will last.

I want the same attitude in the clinic I build next. Needles to the body, sentences to daily life, drawings to understanding. May the three read not as separate jobs, but as one form of care.