Patient Guides

Written to be read in order, and useful in any order.

1. 01 The five documents to ask for before you leave the clinic Almost everything a clinic hands you at discharge is written for you. The documents your doctor at home will need are different, and they are far harder to obtain once you have flown.
2. 02 Quote, deposit, final estimate: which number is the one that binds A price sent before anyone has examined you is an estimate of a plan that does not exist yet. The shape of the bill is checkable even when the figure is not.
3. 03 After you fly home: who to contact, in what order, if something goes wrong Anything urgent is treated locally, and anything about what was done goes back to the operator. Korea also has a statutory mediation route that a patient abroad can use by email.
4. 04 How to check a Korean clinic and its agency before you pay anyone Both the clinic and the agency sit on public registers. Here is how to look each one up in about ten minutes, and what a registration does not prove.
5. 05 What a treatment day in Seoul actually looks like, hour by hour Nobody publishes this, because it is not persuasive. It is the thing patients ask us about most: where you wait, what you sign, where your clothes go, and when you are allowed to leave.
6. 06 The room the photographs never show Clinic interiors are photographed the way hotels are, and for the same reason. Here is what to look at in those pictures, and what their absence tells you.