Clinical Work

Where I Practice

I lead the Department of Neuropsychiatry of Korean Medicine at the National Medical Center, a leading public hospital in Korea. I have practiced here since 2010, serving as department head for most of the past decade. Working in a public institution has shaped my clinical identity. My patients include not only those who have chosen integrative care, but those the healthcare system reaches last - disaster survivors, mothers in vulnerable circumstances, and people whose suffering has gone unrecognized for years.

Who I Care For

The center of my clinical work is trauma, women’s mental health, and the suffering that arises where body and mind meet. People living with the aftermath of accident and loss, of violence and disaster. Anxiety and insomnia that will not lift. Pain that shows up in the body, and autonomic overarousal, that no test fully explains. The narrowed lives that come when emotion cannot be regulated. Women moving through depression and anxiety in the seasons of childbirth and caregiving. And adults who discover late that ADHD has been shaping their story - many of them women. What these patients share is not a single diagnosis. It is a nervous system that has learned, at great cost, to protect itself, and a person who has long blamed themselves for it. My care also reaches those living with cancer and those approaching the end of life; I have completed the standard training program for hospice and palliative-care professionals and provide Korean Medicine care to cancer and hospice patients - the place where relating differently to suffering matters most.

How I Work

My practice integrates two things usually kept apart: the physiological care of Korean Medicine - acupuncture and herbal medicine - that supports sleep, autonomic regulation, and the body’s capacity to settle, and mindfulness- and somatic-based psychotherapy, including Hakomi, Brainspotting, and M&L. In the consulting room the role of Korean Medicine is simple and clear: to help the body steady enough that the mind can do its work. And increasingly, the aim that runs through all of it has become simple too - to help the people I work with recover their capacity for self-compassion, the ability to meet their own suffering as they would a dear friend’s.

Public Care, Public Programs

In a public hospital, clinical work means not only seeing patients but building programs. Since 2018 I have led the National Medical Center’s postpartum health-care program, supporting mothers’ physical and emotional recovery, and I have studied its outcomes in published work. I have designed and run an insomnia support program and an acupuncture-support program for vulnerable populations, and I have contributed to the hospital’s disaster mental-health response, including the training of clinicians in Korean Medicine primary care for trauma.

In 2022, after the Itaewon tragedy, I took part in a joint volunteer effort by the Korean Brainspotting, Bach Flower, and EFT communities, providing online trauma sessions to those affected. Disaster response, for me, is not a policy abstraction but part of clinical work.