People planning surgery in Korea ask,and the surgeon who would operate answers

Surgeon · Plastic Surgery

Follow-up does not end at the airport. For three months after you leave we keep a scheduled remote review: photographs at set intervals, a written response from me, and a video call when photographs are not enough. Your coordinator holds the schedule so you are not the one chasing it. If something concerns you between checkpoints, send it in rather than waiting for the next date. Where local care is needed we will say so clearly and put it in writing for your doctor at home.

Surgeon · Breast & Endocrine Surgery

Yes, screening remains possible, but it changes and you should plan for that rather than be surprised by it. Mammography with implants uses additional displacement views, so the appointment takes longer and the centre needs to be told beforehand that you have implants. Ultrasound and MRI are not obstructed by an implant in the same way. A family history like yours is the more important part of your question. A first-degree relative diagnosed at 52 usually means your own screening should begin earlier than the general recommendation, and that decision belongs with a physician where you live who can take a full family history. I would want that discussion to happen before surgery, not after, because it may affect which plane the implant is placed in.

Chief Surgeon · Plastic Surgery

In revision eyelid surgery the scar depends less on how many operations you have had and more on where the previous incision sits and how thick the skin is. When the new line can be placed over the old one, the visible scar often does not increase. When it cannot, we plan the line so that it falls inside the natural fold. This differs from person to person, so I would want to look at the existing fold in person, or at clear photographs, before I say what is realistic in your case.

Surgeon · Anesthesiology

You are right to raise it, and the fact that nobody asked is a gap worth closing. Several common supplements affect bleeding or interact with anaesthetic agents even though they are not prescriptions. Fish oil and vitamin E are among the ones we routinely ask about for that reason, and herbal sleep preparations matter because some of them potentiate sedatives, which changes how much anaesthetic you need. I am not able to tell you which of yours to stop or when without seeing the actual products, because the ingredients vary a great deal between brands and the same name can mean different formulations in different countries. What I would ask is that you photograph the labels, including the ingredient list, and send them with your pre-operative questionnaire. As a general rule we would rather know about everything you take, including things you would not think of as medicine, than assume.

Chief Surgeon · Plastic Surgery

Doing both in one operation is technically reasonable and it is common, so the travel argument is fair. But it should follow the diagnosis, not lead it. Width at the upper third of the face and width at the lower third look similar in a mirror and are corrected by different operations, and taking bone from the part that was not the problem does not make the face smaller, it makes it flatter. A CT and a front-and-oblique assessment will usually make it obvious which one is carrying the width, and sometimes the answer is that neither is, and what you are seeing is soft tissue. I would rather tell you that than operate. If both are genuinely indicated, one operation is better than two, and the recovery is closer to the longer of the two than to the sum.

Surgeon · Anesthesiology

You have identified the right question to ask, and it is a fair one to ask of any clinic in any country. Here there are three anaesthesiologists on staff and one stays in the operating room for the duration of the case, not only at induction and emergence. What is monitored continuously is blood pressure, pulse, oxygen saturation and breathing, and the record of those values is kept as part of your chart. After the operation you are not left to wake alone; nursing staff stay with you in recovery until you are stable and clearly awake. The reason this matters more for an international patient is that if something needs managing, it should be managed by someone who was watching it develop rather than someone called in afterwards. When you compare clinics, ask specifically whether the anaesthesiologist remains present throughout, and ask it as a question about staffing rather than about equipment.

Deputy Director · Plastic Surgery

Your surgeon's advice is the standard one and I would give it too. At five months the tip is still firm and swelling is not distributed evenly, so a deviation you see now is not always the deviation that will remain. Our own timeline for a revision rhinoplasty puts the final result at around twelve months. Operating inside that window means working through scar tissue that has not softened, and it usually makes the second surgery harder than it needed to be. There are exceptions, mostly breathing problems or an implant that is visibly displaced, and those are not about appearance. If you send photographs from the front, side and below now, I can tell you whether yours looks like one of the exceptions or like a nose that needs more time.

Surgeon · Plastic Surgery

Neither is automatically correct. The heaviness can come from the eyelid itself or from a brow that has dropped onto it, and the two look similar in a mirror because the result is the same fold of skin resting on the lashes. The way to separate them is to hold the brow at its original height and see whether the heaviness disappears. If it does, the brow is the cause and removing eyelid skin will improve it only briefly while pulling the brow lower. If it does not, the eyelid is the cause. There is a third possibility worth mentioning: when the muscle that opens the eye is weak, the eye compensates by lifting the brow all day, and that also feels like heaviness. Removing skin in that case does not address it. This is a case where a photograph is not enough and I would want to examine you.

Surgeon · Otolaryngology

Yes, it is a real possibility, and it is the reason I sit in on cosmetic nose plans here rather than only seeing patients who already have symptoms. The narrowest part of the airway is a small area just inside the nostril called the internal nasal valve. Narrowing the bridge or bringing the sidewalls in can reduce that angle without anything looking wrong from the outside. It is preventable at the planning stage: the valve is measured and supported with cartilage when the plan calls for narrowing. Before surgery I check breathing on each side separately, not as a general question, because most people cannot tell which side is doing the work. Please ask any clinic you are considering whether an ENT specialist reviews the plan.

Surgeon · Breast & Endocrine Surgery

Most women with implants can breastfeed, and augmentation is not considered a reason to avoid it. The part that matters is where the incision is made and whether the plane disturbs the ducts and the nerve supply to the nipple. An incision at the border of the areola crosses more duct tissue than one in the fold under the breast, so when someone tells me they are planning a pregnancy, the inframammary approach is usually what I would suggest. I want to be honest about the limits of that reassurance: no one can promise a particular milk supply, with surgery or without it, because a meaningful number of women have difficulty breastfeeding for reasons unrelated to any operation. What surgery can do is avoid adding a reason.

Surgeon · Plastic Surgery

Redness at the inner corner for a period after surgery is expected, not a complication. It is scar tissue maturing, and in most people it settles over several months. What does not settle on its own is a scar placed outside the natural corner line, or an opening made wider than the eye actually needed. So the decision I make before cutting matters more than the aftercare. Some eyes look longer with a small release, and some do not need the inner corner touched at all because the shape is coming from the fold. If you are already worried about the scar, please say so at consultation. It is a legitimate reason to choose a smaller design or none.

Surgeon · Plastic Surgery

The useful question is not how old you are but which layer has descended. Skin, fat and the fibrous layer beneath them age at different rates, and each option acts on a different one. Energy devices and threads work on the more superficial layers and on skin quality, so they suit a face where the outline is still intact and the change is in texture and mild laxity. A facelift repositions the deeper layer, which is what a device cannot reach, so it suits a face where the jawline itself has moved. Age is a poor guide here because two people at 47 can need opposite things. In consultation I look at what happens when the tissue is lifted by hand: if that manoeuvre reproduces what you want, surgery is the honest answer, and if it overshoots it, it is not.

Chief Surgeon · Plastic Surgery

Size is not chosen from a wish, it is chosen from measurements that limit what your body can hold. The base width of your chest, how much soft tissue covers the upper pole, and how much skin you have all set a range, and an implant wider than that range will show its edge or sit unnaturally regardless of how good it looks on the day. Within that range there is genuine choice, and that part is yours. What I would ask is that you decide the range with me before you arrive, from measurements and photographs, so that the days in Seoul are spent confirming rather than deciding under time pressure. If a clinic proposes a size before measuring your chest width, that is worth questioning. Please also tell your coordinator in writing what you do not want, so it is in the record and not only in a conversation.

Surgeon · Anesthesiology

Yes, and a previous episode is one of the strongest predictors we have, so please tell us at the pre-operative assessment rather than on the day. Knowing it in advance changes what we do rather than what we say afterwards. In general terms, the anaesthetic agents can be chosen differently, preventive medication can be given before the end of the operation rather than in response to symptoms, fluids can be managed to avoid the low blood pressure that contributes to it, and the amount of opioid pain medication can be reduced by combining other agents. None of this makes nausea impossible, and I would not want to promise you a comfortable recovery. What I can say is that it is treated as a predictable problem to plan for, not as bad luck. If you still have the record from your previous surgery, bringing it is genuinely useful.

Surgeon · Plastic Surgery

The two are answering different questions. A double eyelid decides where the line sits. Ptosis correction changes how far the eye opens. Which one you need is judged by measuring how much of the pupil the lid covers when you look straight ahead, and how much the lid lifts when you look up without using your forehead. That measurement is the same in any clinic, so the difference usually comes from what was measured rather than from opinion. Please ask each clinic what number they measured and what it means. I would need to see your eyes open and close in person before saying which applies to you.

Deputy Director · Plastic Surgery

Two things decide most of it: where the nerve actually runs in your jaw, and how much bone is taken near it. The nerve does not sit in the same place in every person, which is why we take a facial CT before contouring rather than working from a photograph. The scan shows the canal it travels through and how thick the bone is above and below it, and the cutting line is drawn from that. Temporary numbness of the lip or chin for weeks to a few months is common after jaw reduction and is not the same as damage. Permanent loss is uncommon but it is a real risk and I will not tell you it is zero. Facial contouring is also the one operation here with the longest recovery, several weeks rather than several days, which is worth knowing before you book flights.

Chief Surgeon · Plastic Surgery

It is closer to a difference in what each material is being asked to do than a ranking of safety. An implant raises the bridge and holds a straight line well. Cartilage, whether from your septum, ear or rib, is used where the tissue has to survive pressure and movement, most often at the tip. Many noses end up using both. Rib is a bigger operation with a chest incision and a longer recovery, so I do not choose it unless there is a reason, such as a revision with little usable cartilage left. Neither material is a guarantee. If someone tells you one material never has problems, that is the part I would question, not the material.

Surgeon · Anesthesiology

Controlled hypertension and mild asthma are common and are usually not obstacles by themselves. What matters is how well controlled they are and how recently that was documented. Two things prepared at home make a real difference. First, a current list of your medications with doses, in English, including anything for blood pressure and any inhaler, and a note of when you last needed a reliever inhaler. Second, a recent set of results from your own doctor, typically blood work and an ECG, and for asthma any record of hospital visits or steroid courses in the past year. That lets us complete the pre-operative assessment before you arrive instead of discovering something in Seoul that needs investigation you cannot easily get here. If your asthma has been unstable in the last few weeks, please tell us before you fly rather than after, because it may change the anaesthetic plan or the timing.

Surgeon · Breast & Endocrine Surgery

Because after an implant is placed, part of the breast becomes harder to examine, and anything that was already there is harder to interpret later. The point is not that we expect to find cancer at thirty-one. It is that fibroadenomas and cysts are common at your age, they are usually harmless, and it is much better to know they exist before surgery than to find them on a scan two years afterwards and not know whether they are new. Ultrasound is also more informative than mammography in dense breast tissue, which is typical in your thirties. It takes about fifteen minutes and it does not usually change the surgical plan. When it does, that is exactly the case it was done for.

Surgeon · Anesthesiology

The name sounds gentler than the reality, so I am glad you asked. Sedation is not a lighter version of the same thing on a fixed scale. It is a state where you keep breathing on your own, which means the airway is not secured by a tube, and depth can drift. General anaesthesia is deeper but the airway is controlled. Neither is safer in the abstract. Which is safer for you depends on the length of the operation, your position on the table, your airway anatomy, whether you have reflux or sleep apnoea, and your weight. Whichever we use, an anaesthesiologist stays in the room for the whole operation monitoring blood pressure, pulse, oxygen saturation and breathing. If a clinic offers sedation mainly as reassurance rather than as a decision made on those grounds, that is the part I would ask about.

Surgeon · Otolaryngology

Allergic rhinitis by itself does not rule out surgery. What it does is change two things. First, a congested nose swells more after surgery and takes longer to feel clear, so the early recovery can feel worse than you expected even when the surgery went well. Second, if you are congested on the day of surgery, the mucous membrane bleeds more. So we usually ask patients to keep using their spray on schedule rather than stopping it, and to tell us if there is a flare in the week before. What I would want to know at consultation is whether your blockage improves with the spray. If it does not, the cause may be structural rather than allergic, and that changes the plan rather than cancelling it.

Chief Surgeon · Plastic Surgery

Liposuction is not a weight treatment and I would be misleading you if I let it stand in for one. It removes fat from specific places to change a contour, and the amount that can be removed safely in one session is limited by fluid shifts and by what the skin can redrape over, not by how much you would like to lose. At 15 kg above your target, the honest sequence is to lose most of that first and then look at what is left, because the areas that remain after weight loss are usually the ones that were never going to respond to diet, and those are the ones this operation is actually good at. If you come now, I would most likely tell you the same thing in person, and I would rather you knew before booking a flight. The other reason to wait is that recovery from liposuction runs about two weeks before normal daily activity, which is a long block of a trip to spend on something I would not recommend yet.