Korean Medical TV Dramas

In 1999 I was teaching English in Korea and I used to rush home after work to try and catch the next cliff hanging episode of Heo Jun. This Korean medical TV series was the dramatization of the well-known and loved 16th century Korean physician Heo Jun.

"Heo Jun (허준, 1537?/1539 – 9 October 1615) was a court physician of the Yangcheon Heo clan during the reign of King Seonjo of the Joseon Dynasty in Korea.[1] He was appointed as a court physician at the age of 29. He wrote a number of medical texts, but his most significant achievement is Dongui Bogam (lit. "Mirror of Eastern Medicine"), which is often noted as the defining text of traditional Korean medicine. The work spread to East Asian countries like China, Japan, and Vietnam where it is still regarded as one of the classics of Oriental medicine today. Although Heo Jun worked extensively with the royal family, he put a great emphasis on making treatment methods accessible and comprehensible to common people. He found natural herb remedies that were easily attainable by commoners in Korea. Furthermore, he wrote the names of the herbs using the simple hangul letters instead of using more difficult hanja (Chinese characters), which most commoners did not understand.[2][3]"

At that time there were no English subtitles and I had to ask my Korean family for a running translation. There were no English TV channels and I lived in a county in the middle of Korea where few people spoke English. I was spending more time learning Korean than teaching English just so I could communicate and get around. Even with my family's limited English ability, I was still entranced and riveted to each episode. And each episode ended with a cliff-hanger and the suspense for the next week's episode was contagious. I did literally run home so I could catch at least the opening theme music, which was in itself very catchy. It wasn't until 6 years later that I was able to see the drama again with English translation. In 2013 they did an excellent remake.


In 2005 we were able to rent VHS tapes from a local Korean grocery store in Canada where we now live of a Korean drama called Dae Jang Geum. This drama was a huge international hit and all time classic. Dae Jang Geum is sometimes translated as "Jewel in the Palace". Dae Jang Geum doesn't start out as a medical drama though there are a few scenes with illustrations of Traditional Korean medical practices. It starts out as an intrigue in the royal palace and then develops more of a theme focused on palace cooking and palace politics and customs. The theme later dives very deeply into Korean Traditional Medicine and how Dae Jang Geum learned the art and science in order to return from exile and enter palace life again, but this time as a physician. The palace cooking stuff continues and it is great. Who doesn't love Korean food?

This VHS series also did not have English translations so I had to rely on translations from family and my own interpretation of the actions. If I had spent over $300 I could have ordered English translated CDs. Eventually I was able to watch the drama for the first time on Youtube, in short 10 minute clips that had passable translation. Even with my limited Korean it was obvious many translations were wrong. It was a great revelation to finally be able to see the English subtitles though, and not too long ago, I re-watched it in hour long episodes with good translation. Tragedy, romance, comedy, politics, history, culture, Traditional Korean Medicine - it has it all.

"Dae Jang Geum (Hangul: 대장금; hanja: 大長今; RR: Dae Jang-geum; MR: Tae Chang-gǔm; literally "The Great Jang-geum"), also known as Jewel in the Palace, is a 2003 Korean television series directed by Lee Byung-hoon. It first aired from September 15, 2003 to March 23, 2004 on MBC, where it was the top program with an average viewership rating of 46.3% and a peak of 57.8% (making it the 10th highest rated Korean drama of all time). Produced for US$15 million, it was later exported to 91 countries and has earned US$103.4 million worldwide, becoming known as one of the primary proponents of the Korean Wave by heightening the popularity of Korean pop culture abroad.[1][2][3]

Starring Lee Young-ae in the title role, it tells the tale of an orphaned kitchen cook who went on to become the king's first female physician. In a time when women held little influence in society, young apprentice cook Jang-geum strives to learn the secrets of Korean cooking and medicine in order to cure the King of his various ailments. It is based on the true story of Jang-geum, the first female royal physician of the Joseon Dynasty. The main themes are her perseverance and the portrayal of traditional Korean culture, including Korean royal court cuisine and traditional medicine.[4]"


Now that I have seen more Korean dramas that just have medical or hospital themes I am also interested in ratings and what are the best ones. Of course, what is best is subjective and ratings don't necessarily reflect what one might personally enjoy. I find that a lot of ratings are on Wikipedia. Hur Jun and Dae Jang Geum are in the top ten all time rated Korean dramas, and that is not just drama that involve a lot of Traditional Korean medicine. I remember signing a petition to ask the BBC to play Dae Jang Geum drama for British TV audiences. I don't think it was ever successful, but the drama did play successfully around most of known universe.

An important note to make about Heo Jun and Dae Jang Geum is that they were both directed by Lee Byung-Hoon, who is still going strong making these epic 50 plus episode period dramas based in the Joeson Dynasty history or saeguk. I think they are superb representations of the Korean people and culture - even if only part fantasy and dramatization - there is so much to speak for them.

It seems like it was about 4 years ago that we started watching a lot of Korean TV dramas on our laptop computers utilizing the streaming services of a variety of Asian and Korean drama websites. A lot of these had dubious video and sub-title quality and came with annoying ads. Eventually services like Dramafever and Viki would become the best in quality and we subscribed monthly for a very low subscription rate. A few years ago we cut the TV cable and bought a Chromecast device so we can stream Dramafever and Viki to our big screen TV. The age of binge Korean TV drama had finally arrived.

Here is a list of Korean TV dramas that have a medical theme, plot or drama (In fact if you google "Korean TV medical drama" you will get several lists but these are just the ones that we watched). I must say that 2016 has been an awesome year for good medical dramas from the Koreans.

1. Doctors, 2016
2. Descendants of the Sun, 2016
3. Beautiful Mind, 2016
4. Yong-Pal, 2015
5. Doctor Stranger, 2014
6. Good Doctor, 2013
7. Hur Jun: The Original Story, 2013
8. Sign, 2011
9. Jejunwon, 2010
10. General Hospital 2, 2008

Why is the Korean word for scalpel "mes" 메스? Is that konglish ( Korean-English ) or is a real Korean word? According to Asianwiki it is actually a Dutch word! "Early Korean title was "Green Mes," which translates literally to "Green Scalpel". The word "Mes" is derived from the Dutch language and used in Korea/Japan to refer to a "scalpel". Title was then changed by KBS2 staff to "Good Doctor" due to some people's unfamiliarity with the word "Mes"." There is some very interesting stuff going on with these dramas and I think I will leave that to another post.

Free Course in Healthcare Data Analytics Offered by OHSU

This is a really interesting opportunity that I just registered for from the Informatics Professor - Dr. Bill Hersh:
http://informaticsprofessor.blogspot.ca/2016/09/free-course-in-healthcare-data.html

Medical smartphone apps need research and evaluation

So I finally did start reading a book by Eric Topol - The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands - and this book is an eHealth classic! So much of the focus is on how the smartphone is becoming the major medical instrument of choice, it often makes me think that the smartphone for medical applications is already the TriCorder. Smartphones with visual heart rate monitors are replacing stethoscopes for first year medical students! Seeing the heart is better than hearing the heart?

From a health informatics perspective it really made me think that we need research and evaluation on all the apps that are being used for medical purposes. Just looking around the WWW a little and indeed there are organizations and research about this:

http://www.imedicalapps.com/about/#

https://iprescribeapps.com/

 http://www.jmir.org/2016/8/e222/

Eric Topols's NIH grant for Precision Medicine & Health Informatics Research

I have tried to read Eric Topol's classic books on digital medicine:  "The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands" and the "Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Healthcare" but my local libraries don't seem to carry them. Not in the habit of buying every book I want to read on Amazon. I think Dr. Topol was a keynote at a nearby eHealth conference not long ago. Instead of attending, I subscribed to his Twitter feed which is well worth a look if you are not already inundated with more information feeds than a human could possibly digest in one lifetime.

The biggest news to come from Dr. Topol I may have first read in the San Diego Union Tribune, a news source I normally would never dream of reading, but for various disparate reasons (or algorithms) came to my attention from sundry WWW news sources. In fact I probably first read about it on the good doctors' Twitter posts.  Here is the link to the San Diego article, but it soon became apparent that the RSS was broadly distributed internationally. The Scripps Translational Research Institute, where Professor Topol works, just happens to be in San Diego:
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/jul/06/NIH-scripps-topol/

The NIH doesn't often dole out $120 million grants for research. The last I heard of a grant with that largess was for research on the artificial brain, and I even blogged about that.  What I have not blogged about is precision medicine, which is defined well in this NIH Medline Plus article.  I am kind of wondering if precision medicine is just a plain English way of saying translational bioinformatics and health informatics all rolled into one.

This research project, that involves tapping into the blood samples, DNA, social media, health apps, sensor data, Big Data analytics and health records of a million volunteers, reminds me of  The Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. It certainly does bring to mind a classic in health informatics and epidemiologial research - The Framingham Heart Study of 1948 - which is still providing data for researchers. One can only imagine how the data generated from this research will be analyzed sixty years from now. Artificial Intelligence tools like IBM Watson and Alpha Go, which will probably be employed to help the data scientists, are just in the teething stage, compared to what their exponential computer grandchildren will be able to byte off.

Journal of Medical Internet Research - Good!

Recently out of the blue in spite of Canadian anti-spam laws I have been receiving email updates from the Journal of Medical Internet Research. This is no problem with me. I think the JMIR is the best eHealth journal out there. I think I may even have applied for a job doing web stuff for them once. I have 8 years experience as a technical editor for an open access academic journal plus a diploma in web design and development. Anyway, if there is one eHealth journal I would read all the time and / or want to be published in, it would be the JMIR.

Blip culture, eHealth, and Tibetan Medicine

Another "Pastism" and Alvin Toffler "Futurism" post. The theme seems to be again about the early days of the internet, with only a smattering of relevance to ehealth.

I don't know what it is like now in Nepal but in 1996 in Boudhanath, the enclave of Kathmandu where there is a large population of Tibetan refugees living, using the internet was limited to one of only a dozen or so internet cafes in the entire city of Kathmandu, let alone Boudanath.  The internet cafe was mostly a place to make a long distance telephone call or send a fax. Not many in my immediate family even used email then. Anyway, I wanted to find out how my father was doing following his prostate surgery.  To digress, what was I doing in Boudhanath in the first place?

First off, I had just finished a one year career college diploma in Visual Basic/C Language Programming but instead of looking for a job like I was supposed to, I gave in to the notion to go to Nepal. I was a little disappointed that I had not studied HTML, Java script, and & Web Design because at that time, there was something called the "Internet' developing and I was a sort of a pioneer in that area because I had run a Bulletin Board System (BBS) system and I lived in Silicon Valley North (Ottawa). I guess the allure of the Himalayas had just too powerful a hold over me. The career college I graduated from would later change it's name to Everest College.Why equate getting a job and climbing the highest mountain in the world, I will never know.

I had gone to Nepal with the idea of studying about traditional Tibetan medicine and how ignorant westerners like me could be schooled to learn about it. A few years before I had had an appointment and a health check up with Yeshe Donden in Dharmasala India, the Himalayan town which holds the residence of the Dalai Lama and a large Tibetan refugee population. Yeshe Donden was once the personal physician of the Dalai Lama. Of course, I heeded some of his advise to improve my health, and bought his book "Health Through Balance" when I returned to Canada. I also possessed at the time more than several "medicine buddha initiations from my Tibetan Lama and other Lamas as well.  It was a meditation practice that somehow always had deeply resonated within me and I valued the "mantra as medicine" ideal.

I support Tibetan refugees and human rights and at that time two Tibetans and their families who I had known and corresponded with for many years were both living in Boudhanath. It was a good opportunity for me to travel there then. One of the Tibetans was actually a trained physician from Tibet, but in modern Chinese medical science, not traditional Tibetan medicine. Apparently, he almost had no choice but to study medicine under the Communist education system. Now as a refugee in Nepal, he was more keenly interested in following his natural bent, which was studying Tibetan Buddhist meditation practices.  Through his connections I was able to meet a number of Tibetan physicians, one of whom was Amchi (Doctor in Tibetan)   to the King of the Royal Family of Nepal.  Alas, this was a few years before the bad seed in that royal family took an automatic weapon and annihilated a dozen of the lot, including himself. That left a distant uncle  or relative of the royals to try to take up the vacant throne.

Another Tibetan physician who wore the robes of a monk (some do not) was a keeper and supplier of bags of herbal medicines, all hand picked in the Himalayas.  The bags were larger than 25 kilogram rice bags stacked up from floor to ceiling. From my experience living in South Korea doctors there could speak reasonable English because they had studied western medicine textbooks in English. These Tibetan physicians I was with had no such English language skills, and this was another reason for my being there - teaching English.

Anyway, once it was learned that my father had just gone through surgery for prostate cancer I was informed that traditional Tibetan medicine for him would be very good. Next thing I knew I had a bag of pills to take back home with me. When I got back home and visited my father in the hospital he was still listening to the Qi Gong meditation tape I had given him. I don't think he ever took the Tibetan medicine, but the pills were all nicely wrapped in gold leaf and looked good.  I had  previously heard about PADMA 28, Tibetan medicine for the heart, but had no idea about all the "precious pills" the Men-Tsee-Khang had in their stores for other illnesses and conditions. 

So this is all just to say that medical systems like those in Tibet are ancient - comprising thousands of years of evolution and development - while eHealth systems in comparison are a "blip culture", a phrase coined by Alvin Toffler. If you click that link you will find an interesting chapter (by the same name)  in a book called Evidence-Based Health Communication".

One spin off of the ancient meditation cultures like Tibet for eHealth has been a proliferation of apps  for mindfulness meditation.  I think this an amazing development, in line with computer brain interfaces, EEG mindfulness feedback systems, virtual reality temple visits, and whatever else you can think of from the touch of a button. The cultural anthropologist in me still thinks an app is not real communication, but since I successfully completed an online 8 week course on mindfulness meditation, I am not one to talk. I thought the course was brilliant and I have done the real 10 day silent mindfulness meditation retreats.  I blogged about that < here >.

eHealth Ontario Innovation Lab at Mohawk College

Innovation Lab Pilot Now Live

We have recently launched an Innovation Lab – in partnership with Mohawk College – where over 100 early adopters from educational institutions, health care organizations, and private sector companies across the country are testing and refining solutions to help transform patient care in a virtual electronic health record (EHR) environment. Available in its initial form at innovation-lab.ca, this free online service gives access to a data set that simulates the provincial client registry – the repository which uniquely identifies patients based on demographic information and links them to medical records such as lab results or hospital discharge summaries. The lab also provides a moderated forum for discussions. Patient names and data used are fabricated to safeguard privacy and confidentiality. “This is the first time we’ve been able to offer IT solution developers and vendors open access to a virtual EHR testing environment,” says Peter Bascom, Chief Architect, eHealth Ontario.  “The lab encourages experimentation with eHealth Ontario products by demonstrating interoperability with provincial EHR assets. It will create the opportunity for more companies to enter the digital health market and it will help vendors who want to respond to procurement proposals to better understand the risks and costs associated with EHR asset integration.” Interested in becoming an early adopter? Go to innovation-lab.ca, provide some basic information through registration, and begin testing. The lab will be rolled out more broadly this fall with more EHR data and services as well as lessons learned from our early adopters.