345 plastic surgery Korea: a multilingual site is not an interpreter
Written by KCODI medical interpreter team · English deskUpdated · 8 min read
Searching 345 plastic surgery korea usually means the clinic is already on a shortlist and you want a reason to keep it there or drop it. Reviews are the wrong instrument for that. They describe how somebody felt, not what was agreed.
Here is what the clinic publishes about itself, what a site translated into seven languages does and does not promise, the checks that apply to every Seoul clinic, and a second itemised quote so the first one has something to sit next to.
KCODI is a booking and medical-interpretation service. We are not affiliated with this clinic and take no position on it.
What the official site states
The site gives the name as 삼사오성형외과, rendered in English as 345 Plastic Surgery, and the address as 116 Bongeunsa-ro, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, across three floors of the Eunseong Building. The nearest station listed is Sinnonhyeon.
The published areas are facial contouring including cheekbone reduction, square jaw surgery and chin work, jaw surgery, facelift procedures described as mini-lift and minimal-incision SMAS lift, eye surgery, nose surgery, breast surgery and dermatology. The site is offered in Korean, English, Japanese, Thai, Chinese, Mongolian and Indonesian. Opening hours are not stated on the pages our team could read, and the site does not state registration to treat foreign patients. Those are the clinic's own statements as of the date checked above.
If the nose is why you are here, what the different graft materials and approaches actually do is set out on our rhinoplasty in Korea page, along with what moves the price up or down.
What a seven-language website does not tell you
A translated site means a clinic wants overseas patients. That is useful to know, and it is roughly where the information ends.
- Marketing pages are translated once. Consent forms, risk explanations and aftercare instructions usually are not.
- A language shown on the website may be a chat channel handled by a coordinator during office hours, not a person standing beside you.
- The consultation and surgery morning are different appointments. Cover on one does not imply cover on the other.
- Translated does not mean medical. A marketing coordinator translating a surgeon's explanation of a risk is not the same as an interpreter trained on the vocabulary.
Ask one question by message: who interprets at the consultation, and who interprets on surgery morning, in which language, and is that person employed by the clinic. The answer arrives in a sentence or it does not arrive. Our guide to finding an English-speaking clinic in Seoul covers what the realistic answers look like.
The reason this matters is not politeness. The consultation is where the surgeon explains what your anatomy allows, where the plan is narrowed, and where the risks are stated in the form you will later sign. Those sentences are the hardest part of the appointment to translate, and they are the first thing dropped when a coordinator is summarising rather than interpreting.
Surgery morning is a shorter appointment and a more important one. You are asked to confirm the plan, sometimes to approve a change, and you are marked up while awake. Nobody should be doing that through a phone translation app, and almost nobody plans in advance not to.
Six checks before you book at any Korean clinic
| Check | What it protects you from | The ask |
|---|---|---|
| Operating surgeon named | A different doctor operating than the one who counselled you | The surgeon's name printed on the quote |
| Itemised written quote | Items appearing after the deposit | Surgery, grafts or implants, anesthesia, aftercare, follow-ups listed separately |
| Anesthesia arrangement | Sedation handled without dedicated monitoring | Whether a specialist anesthesiologist is present for the whole operation |
| Revision terms | Assuming a touch-up is included when it is not | Which revisions are covered, in what window, at what cost |
| Foreign patient registration | No reporting duty toward overseas patients | The registration, checked by you rather than described to you |
| Interpretation on both days | Consent and aftercare being the parts that get lost | Who interprets at consultation and who on surgery morning |
Nose surgery adds one more: ask what material is planned, where it comes from, and what happens if the surgeon changes the plan once the operation has started. That answer belongs in writing too.
Reading reviews of a Gangnam clinic honestly
Clinics with translated sites collect reviews in several languages, and those reviews are produced under different incentives. Some are patients. Many come from agencies paid a commission per booking. A share of the Korean ones were written for a discount.
The parts worth reading are the boring ones: did the quote change between the message and the room, how many follow-up visits were there, did anyone explain the aftercare, was the surgeon the person in the consultation. Reviews that mention none of that are describing a mood.
It also helps to notice what a pile of reviews cannot contain. Nobody writes six months later, when the result has settled and the honest verdict exists. The people who post are the delighted and the furious, in the first three weeks, while the face is still changing. The quiet majority in between never writes anything at all, and that group is the one most like you.
Put a second quote next to the first
One written quote is a price. Two written quotes are information. Getting the second costs a message and commits you to nothing.
If you have not settled on the operation itself, clinic matching narrows it quickly, or meet the interpreters who cover surgical cases.
Between the consultation and the deposit
Most bad decisions in medical tourism are not made in the consultation. They are made in the two hours afterwards, when the momentum is still running and a deposit link arrives by message.
- Rewrite the plan in your own words. Which operation, on which structure, with what material, under which anesthesia, how many nights and how many follow-ups.
- Mark every line on the quote you cannot explain, and send those lines back as questions.
- Confirm the surgeon's name is on the document, and that this surgeon is operating during your dates.
- Check the follow-up dates against your flights before agreeing to a surgery date, not after.
- Wait one night. The clinics worth booking with deal with Korean patients who do exactly the same thing.
Keep the message thread, including anything you were told about price. Screenshots taken before payment are the only record most patients ever hold, and figures quoted by message have a way of being remembered differently once you are sitting in the room. Our broader guide to choosing a plastic surgery clinic in Korea works through the rest of the shortlist.
