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Get in Touch

Questions about a post, corrections, speaking invitations, or requests to reprint an essay are all welcome. The fastest way to reach me is by email.

Email: dr.guak@gmail.com

I read every message, though replies may be slow: I write these notes between clinic days, and patients come first.

About the Author

  • Tae Ho Guak, MD · Neurologist
  • Twenty-five years in clinical practice; headache clinic and neurological laboratory
  • Riche Clinic, Jeongja-dong, Bundang-gu, Seongnam, Republic of Korea

Author of The God Neuroscience Found: A Neurotheology of the Embrace from Behind and other books on neurology and faith.

Please Note: This Is Not Medical Advice

Everything published here is general information written for a lay reader. It is not a diagnosis, not a prescription, and not a substitute for seeing a physician who can examine you.

I cannot answer questions about your own symptoms, test results, or medications by email. If something is wrong, please see a doctor where you live.

If It Is an Emergency

A sudden severe headache, weakness on one side of the body, slurred speech, a drooping face, or a change in consciousness are emergencies. Call your local emergency number or go to an emergency department immediately. Do not write to me and wait for a reply.

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Ninety-nine degrees: what the brain does in the moment a life turns

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There is a kind of suddenness that neurologists are trained to fear. When a patient tells me something happened all at once — the weakness, the drooping face, the loss of speech — I immediately start thinking about blood vessels. In my clinic, sudden usually means something tore or something clogged. But there is another kind of suddenness, and I have never known how to chart it. A man came to me for years with chronic headache. Fifteen years of it, and somewhere along the way the painkillers had quietly become part of the problem rather than the solution. I explained this to him at nearly every visit. He nodded at nearly every visit. Nothing changed. Then one morning he sat down and said, before I had asked him anything, "I can't live like this anymore." And from that week he did rebuild all of it — the medication, the sleep, the coffee, the way he carried his work home. Not gradually. From that week. What had I said that day that I had not said for fifteen years? Nothi...
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The more I learned about the brain, the more I found God

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When I was younger, I assumed that knowledge and faith were on a seesaw. The more science you loaded onto one side, the higher belief would rise off the ground — until one day it floated away entirely. Learn enough, and God would simply have nowhere left to stand. Thirty years inside the human brain taught me the opposite. Here is the strange thing no one warns you about in medical school: understanding does not shrink the mystery. It relocates it, and usually it makes it larger. You finally grasp how a neuron fires — and behind that clean fact stands the question of how eighty-six billion of them, firing in the dark, produce the experience of tasting coffee, or missing your mother, or believing anything at all. Every answer in neuroscience is a door, and behind almost every door is a bigger room. We honestly understand less than one percent of the human brain. The more precisely we map that one percent, the more clearly we see the size of the ninety-nine. ...
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Even When You Did Not Answer, You Were There

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Even in the silence, someone is there. Even When You Did Not Answer, You Were There A neurologist remembers three patients, and the dawns he spent beside them Tae-Ho Guak, MD (John) · Neurologist Back to the dawn shift in the ER These days I see patients in an outpatient clinic in Bundang. But when I was first starting out as a neurologist, one of the things I did most often was assess a patient’s level of consciousness in the emergency room. “Open your eyes for me.” “Squeeze my hand.” “Can you hear my voice?” I would go through the prompts in a fixed order and note at which step the response came, then convert it into a number. That instrument is called the Glasgow Coma Scale. The numbers were added up and written into the chart as a single line: GCS 9. GCS 11. That one line settled the matter of a person’s consciousness. At two in the morning, again at four, I would repeat the same assessment once an hour. Back the...
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