Menstrual Health
Periods, pain, and the cycle as a report on everything else
Korean medicine reads the menstrual cycle the way a modern clinician reads a lab panel — as the body's most regular report on itself. The Donguibogam, the 1613 master text, devotes an entire chapter to the womb and the cycle, and its opening premise is one many patients arrive already believing but have rarely had confirmed: a cycle that is off its term is not a personality trait. It is a finding.
What the classical texts say. The Womb chapter (포문 胞門) is a complete menstrual medicine. It reads timing, volume, color, clotting, and — above all — when the pain falls:
Pain before the flow means something to move; pain after means something to feed. This single distinction decides the whole treatment, and getting it backwards is the commonest error.
Early cycles run hot; late cycles run empty. Heavy flow is read as a failure of holding, not an excess of making — which is why formulas that build the Qi are used for heavy periods.
Color reports temperature; consistency reports movement. The chapter contains a full color chart with a formula attached to each finding.
And a warning aimed at practitioners: dark blood, clots, and cramping do not automatically mean cold. Treat them all with warming herbs and, in the text's own phrase, the harm arrives before you can turn on your heel.
The chapter is equally direct about causes that are not local. Menses stopped by anger and constraint get a formula for the mood, not a formula to force the cycle. Heavy bleeding that follows a reversal of fortune is named as its own pattern — and the physician is told to talk with the patient first, before prescribing anything.
We translated this chapter in full, alongside the Women's chapter that follows it:
→ The Womb — full translated chapter
How we treat it. Acupuncture and classical herbal formulas, chosen by pattern:
Cheongyeoljohyeol-tang 淸熱調血湯 — for cramping that begins before the flow, with clots and heat.
Jogyeong-san 調經散 — for a cycle that keeps no term, cold below and dry above.
Gogyeong-hwan 固經丸 — for flow that is consistently too heavy.
Gaeulsamul-tang 開鬱四物湯 — for bleeding that began with a period of real strain.
Gwichulpajing-tang 歸朮破癥湯 — for absent periods with a palpable mass and pain.
A note on scope. Heavy bleeding, bleeding after menopause, sudden severe pelvic pain, or a new pelvic mass should be evaluated by a gynecologist — we will always tell you when something belongs there first. We work well alongside that care, and often after it, when the imaging is clear and the symptoms are not.
This approach may help if you're dealing with: irregular or unpredictable cycles · period pain and cramping · heavy or prolonged bleeding · PMS and premenstrual mood changes · absent periods (amenorrhea) · PCOS-related cycle irregularity · endometriosis-associated pain · spotting between cycles · cycles disrupted by stress.
The Donguibogam translation project at formulas.raahacupuncture.com is researched and translated by Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.