The Physician of Traditional Medicine Returns from Murim - Chapter 332

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 332

“Twelve….”

“Thirteen….”

“Just one more! You can do it, you can do it!”

“Clinic Director. Don’t drop it so suddenly, let’s slowly control the weight!”

“Fourteen.”

“Just one more!”

“Fifteen.”

Clang!

Hwang Sanghun released the gym machine and gasped for breath.

Just two weeks ago, he could only manage 12 reps.

With everyone making a fuss beside him, he actually succeeded in completing 15 reps.

“Ah! I knew you could do it.”

“Should we increase the weight next time?”

“No, huff, no. This time I really… barely succeeded. Haah… Next time is absolutely impossible.”

“You need to push to that barely manageable level for muscles to grow! If that’s too much right now, should we do 15 reps one more time and then increase the weight?”

Next time didn’t mean the next shoulder and back workout session, but right now?

Hwang Sanghun’s hands trembled.

Since Jeon Yongjun and Lee Youngwoo stuck around to cheer during personal workout time.

Even on days when Jeon Yongjun was teaching other members, several people approached.

Apparently they’d wanted to talk to Hwang Sanghun for a while?

“Thank you all…. I’ll try a few more sets by myself. You all need to work out too, but I’ve taken up too much of your time.”

“Oh, it’s fine. The Clinic Director is finally getting into exercise and coming every day, so we should help out.”

Somehow through word of mouth, his 5 times a week had become every day.

Hwang Sanghun couldn’t bring himself to tell them he was planning to rest tomorrow.

“Clinic Director, if you’re too tired, would you like to do cardio together?”

How does cardio follow after “if you’re too tired”?

He really thought he’d reached his physical limit, but when Lee Youngwoo led him to the treadmill, he managed to exercise some more.

“You’ll be at the clinic tomorrow, right? I think I need another consultation.”

“Of course. Come anytime.”

He tried to smile as he always did with patients in the examination room, but even his facial muscles wouldn’t move properly.

In the end, he completed an additional 30 minutes of cardio before finally leaving the gym with Lee Youngwoo.

When Hanyewon asked if Lee Youngwoo was a friend, they were just acquaintances who exchanged greetings.

But exercising together like this, he ended up talking more than with the clinic staff.

“How is it? Feeling refreshed today too?”

“Yes….”

The most absurd thing was that he didn’t entirely dislike exercising like this.

If it had been purely torturous, he would have found a way to quit somehow.

Though the exercise process was difficult, seeing noticeable improvement as his reps increased gave him a sense of accomplishment.

Was it natural since he was exercising more than three times as much as before?

“Oh, you worked out properly yesterday too! Your back is perfectly straight!”

The next day, as soon as he arrived at work, Hanyewon gave him a thumbs up.

“How did you know?”

“I can tell from your complexion and the angle of your shoulders and back. You did shoulders and back yesterday, right? Sitting with proper posture is becoming most comfortable now, isn’t it?”

“….”

Even so, she could tell this?

Hwang Sanghun could roughly guess the pain location and intensity when patients with ailments walked in.

But estimating workout volume was almost supernatural, wasn’t it?

He hoped people would forget Hwang Sanghun’s nonsense.

But somehow the rumors only kept spreading.

“Clinic Director, I heard you’re working out? Wow, your build looks different!”

Patients he’d met at the gym were one thing, but how did the regular elderly patients who’d been coming all along hear about it?

Did they hear it while getting treatment from Hanyewon when Hwang Sanghun wasn’t there yesterday?

Or did patients become friendly with each other in the waiting room?

“Seeing you at the clinic, you have a different presence.”

At Lee Youngwoo’s words, Hwang Sanghun let out a deep sigh.

At first he got caught up in patients’ comments, but now he’d become quite skilled at deflecting.

“Thank you. Mr. Lee Youngwoo, how is your body feeling?”

He needed to brush it off with pleasantries and quickly move to discussing the patient’s health.

During the initial consultation, Lee Youngwoo said he hadn’t had a bowel movement for a week and complained of occasional abdominal pain.

When Hwang Sanghun took a detailed dietary history, he ate an incredible 2 packs of chicken breast per day and protein shakes morning and evening.

Hwang Sanghun had instructed him to stop the shakes for now, eat chicken breast no more than once every 3 days, and observe his symptoms.

“It seems a little better. Taking the constipation pills makes it come out. But the speed and condition don’t feel particularly good.”

“Is it loose or hard?”

“It’s hard. Ah, it’s a bit awkward to talk about this….”

“You need to tell the doctor in detail. Stool condition is an important diagnostic indicator.”

With constipation being the main symptom, he couldn’t just gloss over it because describing it in detail felt awkward.

Not all constipation is the same.

Even in Western medicine, acute constipation, chronic atonic constipation, spastic constipation, and constipation due to nutritional deficiency are treated differently.

In traditional Korean medicine, the causes of chronic constipation are divided into qi deficiency, blood deficiency, yin deficiency, heat bind, cold constipation, and qi stagnation, with medicines prescribed according to pattern identification.

“It’s hard. It doesn’t come out well unless I strain a lot.”

“Like rabbit droppings that break off in pieces?”

“Uh….”

He doesn’t know what rabbit droppings look like.

Showing him a photo would be a bit much, so a diagram would be better, right?

Hwang Sanghun searched for the Bristol Stool Scale on the internet and displayed it on the screen.

Type 1 was the pattern of blood deficiency constipation.

Due to insufficient body fluids in the body, the stool wasn’t connected as one piece but was hard and broke off in chunks.

“It seems similar to type 2 or 3. If I strain hard, it comes out in a stream, but it’s so hard I worry about tearing, so I’m a bit careful.”

“How’s the frequency?”

“When I take constipation pills, at least something comes out. The Clinic Director told me to try taking them for a week first, so it was okay when I was taking them, but when I stopped this week, it comes out about once every 2-3 days.”

“Does your stomach hurt?”

“No. I feel like not everything came out, but it doesn’t hurt like before treatment.”

Hmm, at this level there is some improvement just with constipation pills.

“You’ve been eating vegetables properly, right?”

“Yes. I ordered salads in bulk and chewed and swallowed them every morning. I quit the shakes as you said, Clinic Director, and didn’t eat chicken breast either. The only chicken I had was when they ordered fried chicken for overtime work – just that once.”

It seemed the condition had progressed quite a bit to be completely cured with just symptomatic treatment and dietary control.

“It would be good to use medicine. Your body condition has changed a lot due to your unbalanced diet all this time.”

“Ah… I guess I got too excited about my body getting bigger and went overboard.”

Lee Youngwoo drooped his shoulders and muttered.

“It’s okay. We’ll use medicine to flush out what’s stuck, and if you eat balanced meals and exercise, you’ll be fine.”

“Yes! Let’s work hard together!”

Hwang Sanghun squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again.

His eyes became slightly moist, but he had to continue the examination for the prescription.

When prescribing medicine, distinguishing between hot-cold and deficiency-excess, especially deficiency-excess, is important.

If you give tonics to excess-type patients, their stuffiness becomes even worse.

If you force deficiency-type patients to have bowel movements, they’ll have diarrhea and lose all their energy, actually harming their health.

In the case of constipation, excess-type constipation is said to be much more common among all constipation patients, but these patients often show good effects with Western constipation medications.

So the majority of constipation patients seen at Oriental Medicine Clinics are deficiency-type.

These were cases where elderly or thin people had weak energy so intestinal movement didn’t occur well, or they lacked nutrition, or their body fluids dried up so stool couldn’t pass smoothly.

“Let me see your tongue.”

“Ah. Ahhh?”

But when Lee Youngwoo stuck out his tongue, there was a thick yellow coating.

“Could you lie down looking at the ceiling?”

“Oh, it hurts a little when you press there.”

His abdomen was also bloated, and there was tenderness when pressed.

Even checking his pulse, it was strong and beating thickly.

All the various physical symptoms, including the stool pattern, pointed to excess-type.

Constipation due to heat accumulation caused by eating too much meat.

“I’ll use a medicine called Jowi-seunggi-tang to flush it out powerfully. Think of it as releasing stagnant stomach heat and promoting intestinal movement.”

“Ah, yes.”

The reaction wasn’t bad when he was given constipation pills, which were symptomatic medicine.

But that medicine was a regular medication made so that even deficiency-type patients could take it with minimal side effects.

Since Lee Youngwoo had severe heat accumulation and a robust physique, using stronger medicine would be appropriate.

Since he had seen similar treatment cases in study sessions, Hwang Sanghun prescribed without difficulty and finished explaining the medicine.

When he first started seeing patients, he lacked confidence and would only speak in general directions before running to Hanyewon to ask about prescriptions.

He could feel that he had grown in various ways in this area too.

“Fortunately, your uric acid levels have also entered the normal range, so there’s nothing to worry about. Take your medicine properly. Let’s monitor your blood tests periodically.”

“Yes!”

Finally, he explained the blood test results.

Since uric acid is a byproduct produced when protein breaks down, it seemed to have come out high because it was measured while eating only chicken breast every day.

Since it entered the normal range after stopping, there was nothing to worry about, but careful observation was needed because if blood uric acid concentration rises and accumulates in joints, it could lead to gout.

“Sigh, truly excess is as bad as deficiency. I’ll be careful. Thank you so much for letting me know before something serious happened.”

Lee Youngwoo sighed with great relief and bowed to Hwang Sanghun.

After seeing him out and writing the prescription, it was dinner time.

And for dinner… a chicken breast salad that Hanyewon had specially ordered was waiting for Hwang Sanghun.

‘…Excess is as bad as deficiency. Too much is the same as not enough….’

Right, until now it must have been not enough.

Hwang Sanghun picked up his fork with tears in his eyes.

* * *

I ate salmon salad while looking over charts.

Since Patient Lee Youngwoo had just visited, I was curious about how his progress was going.

Last time I had only prescribed regular constipation medicine, so I wondered if there had been a response to that?

“Ah, he ended up using herbal decoction.”

Jowi-seunggi-tang.

The Seunggi-tang series has strong medicinal properties so it’s not easy to prescribe boldly, but he chose well for a patient who needed it.

It seemed that Kim Chunsik’s compilation of treatment cases for Seunggi-tang series prescriptions last time had been helpful.

The dietary guidance records, which are most important for this type of patient, were also neatly organized.

It was an interesting aspect that Hwang Sanghun himself needed to consume much more protein, yet was treating a patient who had too much.

Well, the important thing is to do everything in moderation and maintain balance.

“Are you done with all the consultations for today?”

With that in mind, I stood up from my seat, intending to encourage Hwang Sanghun’s exercise routine today as well.

Though I was busy without even time for dinner in between, fortunately there were no patients just before closing time, so all the patients on the 3rd floor had finished their payments.

I told the staff to wrap up early and went up to the 4th floor.

But when I went upstairs.

“Hello, Clinic Director.”

There was a guy who looked like the final evolution form that Hwang Sanghun might become if he exercised like this for over 5 years, bowing at a 45-degree angle.

“It’s been a while. What brings you here, Dr. Hwang Jihun?”

Hwang Jihun, Hwang Sanghun’s older brother.

Whether he heard his voice from inside or heard my words.

The door to Hwang Sanghun’s examination room swung wide open.

“I heard my younger brother has been exercising diligently lately thanks to you, Clinic Director?”

At those words, Hwang Sanghun glared at me with resentful eyes.

No, I didn’t say anything.

I’ve never even contacted you personally until now!

I only mentioned it in passing to Seoyoung.

“Thanks to me? Dr. Hwang is working hard on his own.”

“Oh please, I dragged him around for a year… I know better than anyone that he’s not the type to do it on his own.”

As he clicked his tongue right in front of him, Hwang Sanghun finally couldn’t stand it and interrupted.

“Don’t tell me you came all the way to my workplace just to talk about exercise?”

Right. Why is he here?

It’s not like when he was in Changwon, and it’s been quite a while since he returned to Seoul.

As expected, Hwang Jihun shook his head.

“No, I came to pick you up today.”

Hwang Sanghun’s face crumpled.

“You clearly said it was the last time before. Now what is it this time…?”

Though he had helped with Hwang Jihun’s affairs before, perhaps not liking getting constantly dragged into family matters, Hwang Sanghun seemed ready to push back against whatever Hwang Jihun might say.

“Old Man collapsed.”

But the next moment, Hwang Sanghun was left speechless.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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