The Korea times has an article on “surgery tours” being run to Thailand for cosmetic surgery, particularly breast augmentation. According to a woman interviewed about her experience with one of the tours the cost was less than 3.4 million won in total for breast augmentation surgery in Thailand. The cost included 2.2 million won for the actual surgery, 700,000 won for a round trip ticket and 400,000 won for a Korean guide. That is about half the cost for the same surgery in South Korea.

According to the story there are two brokers running these tours sending about 100 women a month to southeast Asia for cosmetic surgery. The tours include the usual hotel, shopping and site seeing tours during the recovery period.

There are the usual detractors of these tours. They did manage to find one woman who complained of breast pain upon returning home and could not get any help from the tour operator. And there is always a local doctor available to disparage the quality of care at foreign medical centers. The one they found for this article had this to say “I heard that many hospitals in Southeast Asia use substances of low quality imported from China for surgery. During surgery we have often found unidentified alien substances that have never seen before,’’ said Yoo Sang-wook, a cosmetic surgeon in Seoul. Amusing. I think I’ve read similar comments from doctors in Europe about surgery in Korea. Of course if you go to the top medical centers, take Yanhee or Bumrungrad for example, there is no better quality of surgery available anywhere in the world.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Medical Tourism News, Surgery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.