This comes up a lot. And I often read posts that say there is hardly any advantage to .357 over the .38 in a short barrel. People like to say that most/all the powder is wasted on the short barrel, and there is hardly any advantage with the .357
Well, there is always an advantage in ballastics using the .357 instead of the .38 round. Yes, if you shot the same .357 round out of a 4" barrel vs a 2" one, you're going to get more velocity out of the longer barrel. A good rule of thumb is to find out what test barrel length was used to test a certain round (say .357 in this case) to get it's FPS figure. Then subtract 50 FPS for every inch of barrel shorter your gun is vs the test gun's barrel. So if its 1200 FPS out of a 4.5" barrel, you're probably looking at about 1075 FPS out of a 2" barrel.
But yes, there will be fairly more recoil when using .357 mag in a concealed carry snub, which is probably going to be 2" and weigh about 23 ozs or lighter. If the recoil is just too much for you to be accurate, then go with a .38 load. If you're looking at a .357 load for short barrel, small frame gun, I would recommend Remington Golden Saber 125 gr JHP or Speer's Gold Dot SB 135 gr JHP. Both of these loads are not full power, and have less recoil than most other .357 rounds available.
And I take it "Thatguy" might be referring to his/her own handloads? Especially if it's out of a short barrel, because I don't think I could find a manufacturer that makes a .38 125 grain round that travels 1200 FPS. At that speed a .38 is essentially a .357 round, and out of a short barrel concealed carry gun, thats gonna be just too much recoil to deal with (unless its a sp101 3" or larger). So I don't think his/her response to "XD shooter's" question is much help.
And as far as "S&W620" talking about buffalo bore for SD, that isn't very applicable to the question at hand either.