Why We Built This Section—And Named it "Health in Society"

"Health shouldn't be taken for granted."

The first thing I knew about my father's body was the scar.

It ran across his stomach, long and pale, and I saw it every time we went swimming. I was a child, so I didn't ask. I didn't know that he had been a student in the United States when an operation went wrong, or that when his insurance stopped covering him under his student visa, he had to leave my mother and me — I was four months old — and fly back to Korea for another surgery, alone. I only knew the scar. It took me years to understand what it had cost him: to be a father, a student and a foreigner inside a health system that was never built for him. But I learned the first lesson early, just by looking. Health is not something you are guaranteed.

I learned that again, more slowly, from my grandfather.

For most of my childhood, he lived with Parkinson's. From the time I was four, nearly every memory I have of him is the same: in bed, or in a wheelchair, his body no longer his to command. It was my mother who told me, later, that he had once been active, a man who loved sports. I have spent a strange amount of time grieving the version of him I never knew: the one who could have run with me, talked with me, handed me ordinary memories. That was when I understood that illness is never contained in a single body. It reaches outward, into families, into memory, into the shape of a childhood that forms around it.

The third time, it came for my brother.

I was a freshman in high school when he was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. At first none of us really knew what that meant. We learned fast. Our vocabulary filled with food labels and medication names, hospital appointments and symptoms we watched for. My brother loved to eat. And now, he had to interrogate everything on his plate, every day, with no end date. Watching that taught me something no biology class had: that health is not only what happens in the body. It is the information you can reach, the questions you're allowed to ask, the people who show up, and the way a society treats a condition it doesn't take the time to understand.

None of this made me see health as only sad, or only frightening. It made me see how tightly health is bound to everything else. Our health is shaped by doctors and hospitals — but also by schools, families, money, culture, policy, stigma, and the stories we tell about it. Health is personal. It is never only personal.

That is why we built a section at KYN that exclusively has to do with health and society and why we named it Health in Society.

We are not just future patients, future voters, future professionals. We are already inside the system, right now. We are the students handed thin, embarrassed health classes. We are the teenagers taking medical advice from a feed. We are the siblings and children and friends in the waiting room, watching what illness does to someone we love. And we are the ones who will inherit whatever silence, misinformation and inequality we don't fix.

We are not here only to point at problems. We are here to ask sharper questions, so one day, we can solve them too, for a better future for all of us.

Why are some parts of the body still too embarrassing to name in a classroom? Why do young people learn more from strangers online than from school? Why do some communities get less care, less information, less benefit of the doubt? Why do we keep calling health a personal responsibility, when so much of it is decided before the individual ever walks in?

Health in Society is where we'll try to answer them, as a place where being young is not a reason to be taken less seriously. We'll write about public health and mental health, sexual health and chronic illness, misinformation and access and the quiet conditions that decide who gets to be well. And we'll do it without shame or fear: with curiosity, with empathy, with honesty.

I started this section because I believe health is where medical fact and human life meet, and someone has to translate between them. Statistics can prove a problem exists. Only a voice can tell you what it feels like to live inside one.

Health should not be taken for granted. But it should not be something we talk about only after it breaks.

So we're beginning the conversation now. Earlier, deeper and more honestly than we were taught to.