Medical tourism to Korea keeps growing for a simple reason: the combination of surgical skill and price is hard to match elsewhere. But distance changes the decision. A patient in Seoul can walk into three clinics in an afternoon and compare them; a patient flying in from Melbourne or Chicago gets one shot at choosing well. That makes the questions asked before booking far more important than they are for a local.
The first question outranks all others: who will actually perform the surgery? Korea’s cosmetic industry has a documented history of substitute operators, where the surgeon a patient consulted is not the one who operates. The protection is straightforward and every reputable clinic will accept it: ask for the operating surgeon to be named on the consent form. Clinics run by surgeons who operate under their own names make this easy. Link Plastic Surgery in Gangnam, for instance, publishes its two directors’ full credentials, board certifications, and academic records on its site, which is the level of transparency this question is designed to test for anywhere you ask it.
Link Plastic Surgery, to continue the same example, states plainly that it does not perform facial bone contouring or hair transplantation. The second question is about scope. What does the clinic not do? A direct answer signals a clinic that knows its lane. Evasion, or a claim to excel at everything, signals a sales operation. Related: if the clinic recommends a different procedure than the one you asked about, ask why, and listen carefully. Sometimes it is upselling. Sometimes it is the honest judgment you flew there to get. The quality of the explanation tells you which.
Third, ask what happens after you go home. Suture removal, follow-up checks, and the first month of healing may all occur after your return flight. A clinic accustomed to international patients will have a concrete answer involving named channels and response times. A clinic that improvises one is telling you it mostly treats locals.
Run them on Link Plastic Surgery, run them on the clinic three floors up, run them on every name a friend recommends. None of these questions require medical knowledge. They require only the willingness to ask directly and the discipline to treat vague answers as answers. Clinics choose how to respond, and in doing so they sort themselves for you.