How We Verify the Donguibogam Text

DonguiHub does not claim medical authority we don't have. Here is exactly what we verify, how, and what we still leave open.

It would be easy to make DonguiHub look more authoritative than it is — add a credentialed-sounding name, a review badge, a claim of clinical vetting. We've chosen not to. What follows is the actual process behind every herb page on this site, section by section, so you can judge our reliability by what we do rather than by what we say about ourselves.

1. A character-by-character check against the source text

Every classical quotation on this site starts from one of 24 digitized source files of the Donguibogam's Tangaek-pyeon (湯液篇, herbology volume) — the same text held by the Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine's classics database, mediclassics.kr. Before any quote is published, a script checks it character-by-character against that raw text, after normalizing whitespace, punctuation, and known character variants (for instance, 蔘 and 參, two forms of the character in 'ginseng', are treated as equivalent). If the quote isn't found as an exact, contiguous match, it does not go live. As of this writing, every one of the 144 registered herbs on this site has passed that check.

2. Keeping the classical text and our commentary apart

Two different things are happening on each page, and we try never to blur them. The classical Chinese text and its direct translation are drawn from a public-domain historical source — we are not paraphrasing or interpreting the original wording. The modern overview, context, and framing around that text, however, is written by our editorial process, informed by (but not copied from) the Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine's reference translations. We cite mediclassics.kr on every page precisely because that distinction matters: read our summary if you want the accessible version, but the primary source is one click away if you want to check us.

3. A three-stage review gate: draft, published, verified

Some entries carry a status label most readers never notice: draft, published, or verified. Draft means a herb's quote has been checked against the source text but a human has not yet reviewed it for anything unusual — those pages are hidden from search entirely until that review happens. This gate exists specifically for herbs the original text itself flags as having toxicity (有毒 or 有小毒), a strong pregnancy contraindication, or an ambiguous species identification. We keep a running log of exactly which herbs are waiting and why, and nothing gets promoted out of that queue silently.

4. What we admit we don't have

What we do not have is a licensed Korean medicine practitioner formally reviewing this content, and we say so plainly rather than implying otherwise. Until that changes, DonguiHub is what it says it is on every page's disclaimer: an educational reference on the history and text of the Donguibogam, not a source of medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If something here interests you enough to consider using it, that interest belongs in a conversation with a qualified practitioner — not in this website.