[Eton TV] The Real Reason Foreigners Come to Korea for Plastic Surgery

These days, if you go to Gangnam or the airport,

you can really see a lot of foreign patients.

It’s something that would have been unimaginable in the past.

I, too, never thought I would treat

and operate on foreigners.😄

Even during my residency,

my first experience operating on a white patient

remains a very special memory.

When an American patient, worried about drooping eyes,

came to me, the interpreter,

and said they wanted to receive surgery directly from me,

I felt that the globalization of Korean medicine

had truly begun.

The proportion of foreign patients visiting Korean plastic surgery clinics

is steadily increasing.

At first, there were many Chinese patients,

but after a few years, patients began coming

from Africa, Vietnam, Indonesia,

and truly many other countries.

Now, attracting foreign patients has become

a “must,” not an “option,”

in hospital operations.

I think the first reason foreigners trust Korean medicine and come here

is thanks to K-culture.

The success of K-culture, such as K-pop and K-dramas,

has completely changed the level of trust in Korea.

To be honest,

people have biases.

For example, even if a doctor from a very poor and small country

is excellent and graduated from Harvard Medical School,

it can still be hard to trust them simply because

they are from that country.

In the past, there was a prejudice in the West

that Asians, especially Koreans,

would not be highly skilled or knowledgeable.

But as K-culture became popular around the world,

it provided a decisive turning point

that broke down those prejudices.

As Korea’s cultural status rose,

trust in Korean medical professionals also grew.

If K-culture opened the door,

the next reason patients stay is

the overwhelming skill of Korean doctors.

In the field of medicine, compared with the world as a whole,

I can confidently say that Korea is not second best.

Korean society sent its most outstanding talent to medical school,

and those people then went through fierce competition again

to become plastic surgery specialists.

They have spent nearly 20 years devoting themselves to this field

and building their skills.

Especially in plastic surgery,

Korean doctors are very meticulous.

From my experience performing surgery with a renowned academic doctor from the United States,

I often felt that their hands were rougher

than those of Korean doctors.

In the case of white patients,

because major problems do not arise even without such delicate handling,

they tend to pay less attention to marks

(scars) on the body.

But doctors in our country

put tremendous care into making sure

that marks on the patient’s body are not noticeable.

This meticulousness and level of skill

become the unique competitive strength of Korean medical professionals.

The decisive reason our doctors are at a world-class level

is the overwhelming “surgery case count,”

that is, accumulated experience.

The more surgical experience you have,

the wider the skill gap inevitably becomes.

Korean medicine has two comparative advantages:

price competitiveness and overwhelming quality.

Following the path opened by K-culture,

I am confident that the skill and experience of Korean medical professionals

will become the core driving force leading

the future of Korea’s medical industry.

Thank you.🙏