## Reflux, bloating, appetite, and the medicine of the center
Korean medicine begins where your day does: at the table. Its oldest ethic says food before drugs — "when your lord or father falls ill, first prescribe food; only when food-treatment does not cure, then prescribe medicine." Its physiology names the stomach the root of everything else: "a person has no taproot — water and food are their life." So when digestion falters, the tradition does not treat it as a minor complaint. It treats it as the foundation shifting.
**What the classical texts say.**
The Donguibogam's Internal Damage (내상 內傷) chapter is the tradition's complete digestive medicine — and our clinic has translated all of it, thirty-one sections. It contains the classical accounts of conditions patients describe in our clinic every week: acid reflux and sour regurgitation (with a three-generation scholarly debate on whether acid is heat or cold — resolved, characteristically, in a kitchen: leave dinner in a warm room and taste what happens); the gnawing, hungry-but-not-hungry discomfort it calls jojap; post-meal food coma, diagnosed as stalled rising Qi; the belch, sorted by timing and odor into full-house and empty-house types; stress dyspepsia, named with startling precision — one formula treats illness that comes "from eating noodles amid worry."
[→ Internal Damage — full translated chapter]
**Pain at the top of the stomach.**
The Donguibogam's Chest (흉 胸) chapter adds the other half of the picture: pain. It opens with a correction that still holds — what people call "heart pain," it says, is almost always the stomach. The upper opening of the stomach sits just behind the heart, so a burning or gnawing pain there is felt in the centre of the chest. The chapter sorts this pain by cause — cold, heat, food, phlegm, static blood, and the emotions — and adds two pieces of advice we still give: don't treat a stomach pain with tonics before it has been freed ("what passes does not hurt; what does not pass hurts"), and don't eat freely the moment the pain eases, because that is what brings it straight back. It even names the habit of eating food very hot as the cause of a fixed, stabbing pain at the top of the stomach.
**Full, but not painful.**
The same chapter describes a sensation many patients struggle to name: fullness and oppression under the breastbone, with no real pain and nothing to see from outside. It calls this glomus, and separates it carefully from visible bloating — one is felt within, the other can be seen. The distinction changes the treatment, and it is one of the most common things we hear in a digestive intake.
[→ The Chest — full translated chapter]
**How we treat it.**
Acupuncture calms the gut-stress axis; classical formulas do the finer work, chosen from the chapters' own cabinet — [Pyeongwi-san 平胃散] and its family for the damp, heavy stomach, the coptis-evodia pills for acid, [Samchulgeonbi-tang 參朮健脾湯] for the weak digester, [Galhwahaejeong-tang 葛花解酲湯] where wine is part of the story, and for the oppressive fullness under the breastbone, [Jisilsobi-hwan 枳實消痞丸] where the stomach is weak and [Jisilrijung-won 枳實理中元] where it is cold. And we prescribe the chapter's lifestyle counsel as seriously as its herbs — lighter evening meals, the after-dinner walk, and (our favorite line in the entire text) its note that the Spleen loves music: the moment the ear hears, digestion begins. Yes — that's why there's always piano playing in our treatment rooms.
**Please read this part.**
Chest pain should always have the heart ruled out first. Call 911 for chest pain that is crushing or spreads to the arm, jaw, or back, or that comes with shortness of breath or sweating. See a physician promptly for difficulty or pain swallowing, vomiting blood, black stools, unexplained weight loss, or new digestive symptoms after age 50. If your chest pain is along the ribs or followed an injury, read more here — [Chest & rib pain]
This approach may help if you're dealing with: acid reflux / GERD-type discomfort · burning or gnawing pain at the top of the stomach · bloating and post-meal fullness · a heavy, oppressive feeling under the breastbone · poor appetite or irregular hunger · stress-related digestive symptoms · post-meal fatigue · alcohol-related digestive strain · recovery of appetite after illness.
The Donguibogam translation project at formulas.raahacupuncture.com is researched and translated by Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.