Editorial
Guides for international patients
How to choose a clinic, what treatment costs, and how long you have to stay. Written for people arriving from outside Korea.
How to choose a clinic, what treatment costs, and how long you have to stay. Written for people arriving from outside Korea.
The length of your trip is set by the mandatory follow-up interval, not by how quickly you feel well, and flying too early raises the risk of swelling, bleeding and thrombosis.
Foreign patients without Korean national health insurance pay the full private rate, which is still typically 30 to 70 percent below US pricing for the same procedure, and card payment is accepted almost everywhere.
Processing your own fat during the same operation is permitted as a medical procedure. Cultured or donor-derived cell products are regulated as drugs and need Ministry of Food and Drug Safety approval, which very few hold.
Verify four things before you pay a deposit: registration to treat foreign patients, the specialist qualification of the doctor who will actually treat you, an itemized written quote, and a named follow-up schedule.
Korean clinics generally cap a single session at around five litres of aspirate under general anaesthesia, and that ceiling is a safety limit rather than a pricing decision. Anything beyond it is split across two operations.
Long-term follow-up studies put durable benefit in the range of a decade, with patient satisfaction outlasting what photographs show. The technique used matters less to longevity than most marketing suggests.
Threads tighten the tissue you have and last months to a couple of years. A facelift repositions the layer beneath and removes skin. The choice is decided by how much loose skin there is, not by budget or downtime.
The fat cells removed do not return, but the ones left behind can enlarge, and animal studies show the body compensates by depositing fat elsewhere. Whether the result holds depends on what happens to your weight afterwards.
A multicentre randomised controlled trial found that enriching facial fat grafts with the stromal vascular fraction improved graft survival against a control group. The effect is real, measured, and narrower than the marketing around it.