Editorial policy
How these pages are researched, what we do about the fact that no doctor reviews them, how prices are gathered, and the rules we apply to photographs.
No medical reviewer
These pages are not reviewed by a doctor. We think you should know that before you read anything else here, because plenty of sites in this field imply clinical oversight they do not have.
What we do instead:
- Every factual claim traces to a named source — a regulation, a ministry notice, a peer-reviewed paper, a hospital's own published price list, or a professional body — and the source is listed at the foot of the page with the date we read it.
- We report what sources say rather than advising what you should do. You will not find a recommended technique, a recommended implant or a recommended surgeon here.
- Where the evidence is thin or contested, we say so in the text instead of rounding it off into confidence.
How we handle prices
Prices in Korea are not fixed and are rarely published in full. Where we give a figure we say where it came from: a clinic's published list, a government survey, or a range reported by patients. We give ranges rather than a single number, we date them, and we say what is usually excluded — anaesthesia, the hospital stay, follow-up visits, and the revision that may or may not be free.
Treat every figure here as a starting point for a written quotation, not as a price you can hold anyone to.
Photographs
- Every photograph is a real photograph, credited by name. The illustrative ones are under the Unsplash licence and credited to the photographer; the single clinical figure is under a Creative Commons Attribution licence and credited to its authors and journal. Nothing here is AI-generated.
- No illustrative photograph on this site shows a patient. A photographic licence covers the picture, not the person in it, and putting a stranger's face on a surgery page implies something about them that they never agreed to. The one photograph that does show a patient says so, and prints the consent statement underneath it.
- Captions name the real place when the photographer recorded one, and say “posed by a model” when that is what it is. We never describe a person's nationality unless the photographer did.
- We publish a before-and-after photograph only when all four of these hold: it comes from a peer-reviewed paper under a licence that permits reproduction, the paper states that the patient consented to publication of their images and not merely to treatment, the patient is a stated adult, and the full attribution is printed beside the picture. We do not reproduce clinic galleries, agency galleries or forum reposts, because the consent a clinic holds is consent for that clinic and does not extend to us. As it stands there is exactly one such photograph on this site, on before and after.
What we never publish
- Invented doctors, invented patients, invented quotes or invented reviews.
- Clinic rankings, “top 10” lists, or any placement that could be bought.
- Affiliate or referral links to surgery, or any content a clinic paid for.
Updates and corrections
Rules, prices and licensing change. Pages carry the date they were published and, when they have been checked again, the date of that check. When we correct something material we say what was wrong rather than quietly editing it.
Corrections: [email protected].
Independence
Seoul Serene takes no money from clinics, hospitals, agencies or device makers, and does not arrange treatment for anyone. See who writes this.