Piblokto is a culture-bound syndrome—like how only Americans suffer brain freeze after ice cream or feel existential dread after bingeing a TV series to completion. Korean menopausal women often exhibit hwa-byeong, fire sickness, the result of decades of pent-up rage unleashing itself, usually upon husbands, mothers-in-law, and ungrateful children. The psychosomatic symptoms often arise from an overflow of Han—itself another culture-bound syndrome. There’s no English equivalent, but it seems to afflict all Koreans—a mournful sorrow and railing against fate’s unfairness, an aching of the soul.
Wait, what? Cold-stimulus headaches are cultural? And hwa-byeong. Let me just make a list of things to look up.
