Editorial Policy

How This Guide Is Written, Checked and Corrected

Everything a reader needs in order to decide how much weight to give anything on this site — including the parts we cannot verify.

Gangnam Clinic Guide Editorial · Published September 12, 2026 · Updated September 13, 2026 · Seoul · Reviewed by the Gangnam Clinic Guide editorial team, September 12, 2026

In one paragraph: Gangnam Clinic Guide is written and reviewed by the Gangnam Clinic Guide editorial team, an independent publisher based in Seoul. We are not a medical provider and publish no medical advice. Price figures are compiled from clinic-published price pages and public advertising that we read ourselves — never from clinic-supplied rate cards, never from quotes solicited on a reader's behalf. We take no commissions, no referral fees and no payment for placement or ranking, and we book no appointments. Every page carries the date it was last reviewed, and corrections go to ikboo242@gmail.com.

Who writes and reviews this

Pages are written and reviewed by the Gangnam Clinic Guide editorial team, a small independent editorial operation based in Seoul, publishing in English for readers outside Korea. The team is not made up of physicians, and we say so plainly: nothing here is written by a doctor, reviewed by a doctor, or intended to substitute for one.

What we do have is proximity and language. We read Korean-language clinic price pages, Korean review platforms and Korean regulatory records directly, and we translate what is actually there rather than what an English marketing page says is there. Every page names the editorial team as author, carries a publication date and a review date, and states what the figures on it are and are not.

Byline policy. We publish under the editorial-team byline rather than individual names because the work is compiled and cross-checked rather than reported by a single author. Where a specific person's expertise is the basis of a claim, that person is named in the text and the claim is attributed to them.

What counts as evidence here

We rank sources, and we say which rank a claim came from.

Tier 1 — Regulator records Approval and clearance records published by the agency that issued them: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's device and drug databases, and Korea's Ministry of Food and Drug Safety. Facts at this tier are stated flatly and cited with the record number.
Tier 2 — Public-health and specialty bodies Guidance published by public agencies and medical specialty societies, such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Dermatology. Quoted, attributed, and not extrapolated beyond what the source says.
Tier 3 — Public official listings Government or district-level listings, such as Gangnam District Office's own medical-tourism portal. Used to show what is officially listed, never as a quality judgement.
Tier 4 — Clinic-published material Prices, menus and physician statements a clinic has published itself. Reported as "what this clinic advertises", never as an independent finding.
Tier 5 — Aggregate public signals Volume and consistency of Korean-language reviews, sustained advertising presence, cross-directory consistency. Used only to decide what merits coverage — never as proof of clinical outcome.
Not evidence Before-and-after photographs, patient testimonials, clinic-supplied statistics we cannot trace, and any figure a clinic asked us to publish. These do not appear on this site.

When a claim cannot be placed in one of those tiers, we either write that it is unverified or we leave it out. We would rather publish a shorter page than a page that reads as authoritative about something we guessed.

How price figures are made

Every price box on this site carries six elements, in this order: the median, the range, the basis, the source type, the as-of date and the update cycle. They mean specific things:

Median The midpoint of the advertised range. It is not a survey of quoted totals and not a statistical median of transactions. We have no access to what patients actually paid, and we do not pretend otherwise.
Range The low and high ends of what Gangnam clinics advertise publicly for that item, after removing obvious teaser prices that turn out to be half-doses or unnamed products — those are shown separately as a teaser tier where relevant.
Basis What the range was built from — which tiers, which device generations, which product families.
Source type Clinic-published price pages, public treatment menus and advertised event pricing, read directly by us. No clinic-supplied rate cards, no quotes solicited from clinics, no aggregator feeds, no reader-reported numbers.
As of The month the figures were last read from source.
Update cycle Re-checked monthly. A figure is revised whenever a tier moves, and the page's review date moves with it.

In the price index, where a single page carries many procedures at once, these same elements appear per row rather than in one box: each row gives the median, the range, the unit and the price driver, with the basis, source type, as-of date and update cycle stated once for the whole table. The median means exactly what it means everywhere else on this site — the midpoint of the advertised range. Where a procedure is advertised only as a "from" price, the range has no upper bound, no midpoint exists, and we leave the median cell empty instead of estimating one.

We deliberately do not publish a "sampled n clinics" number. We do not run a formal sample, and inventing one would make the figures look more rigorous than they are. This holds on the price index too, and it is a deliberate difference from other price pages in this market that print an n beside each figure: we would have to reconstruct a sampling frame we never ran in order to print one honestly. We also do not publish live or real-time prices — we have no price feed, and a month-stamped range that is honest about its age is more useful than a number that implies currency it does not have.

Prices are quoted in Korean won with an approximate US dollar conversion for orientation only. Exchange rates move; the won figure is the one to work from.

How a clinic ends up on this site — and what that means

Coverage on this site is editorial coverage, not endorsement. Being described here is not a certification, a recommendation, a guarantee of outcome, or a statement that a clinic is better than one we did not cover.

We keep the covered set deliberately small. The alternative — generating hundreds of clinic pages from directory data — would mean publishing profiles of places we have verified nothing about, under a masthead that claims verification. We are not willing to do that, and it is the single biggest structural difference between this site and the large medical-tourism platforms.

Clinics are considered on publicly checkable signals: sustained presence rather than a pop-up operation; prices published in public so our figures trace to something a reader can also open; physicians who publish under their own names; depth and consistency of Korean-language reviews; and the same claims appearing across independent listings rather than only in a clinic's own self-description. We visited no clinics for the current edition, and accepted no payment, product, treatment or discount from any of them.

If a clinic wants to be removed from a page, email us and we will remove it. We do not require a reason.

How we make money — and how we do not

We take no commissions. There is no referral relationship, revenue share, finder's fee or affiliate arrangement with any clinic named on this site. No clinic has paid for a placement, a ranking position, a favourable description or the removal of an unfavourable one.

We book nothing. We do not book, broker, arrange, relay or refer appointments, and we do not pass reader details to clinics. Korean law regulates who may recruit foreign patients for a fee; we are a publisher, not an agency, and we intend to stay one. Readers contact clinics directly, through the clinics' own official channels.

What we do sell. The publisher behind this guide is a video production studio and sells editorial listings and video production to clinics as a clearly separated commercial product. If any placement on this site ever becomes paid, it will be labelled sponsored in the page body, at the placement itself — not disclosed only here, not disclosed only in a footer, and not merged into a ranking. Unlabelled placements on this site are unpaid. As of the review date above, no page on this site contains a paid placement.

Use of AI in producing this guide

We use AI tools for research assistance, translation support, structuring and drafting. We disclose that because it is true of most publishing now and because readers are entitled to know how a page was made.

What AI does not do here: it does not decide what is true. Every published figure, regulatory record and clinic claim is checked by a person against a primary source before it goes live, and regulator records cited on this site were opened directly at the issuing agency rather than taken from a summary. Where a source could not be opened and confirmed, the claim is not published.

Update cadence

Price figures Re-read monthly; revised when a tier moves.
Regulatory citations Re-checked at each substantive revision of the page, and at minimum every six months.
Clinic descriptions Re-checked monthly for closure, relocation and obvious change.
This policy Reviewed at least twice a year, and immediately if our commercial relationships change.
Every page Carries its own review date under the headline. If a page's review date is old, treat its figures as old.

Corrections, complaints and takedowns

Send corrections to ikboo242@gmail.com. Useful things to include: the page URL, the sentence you are disputing, and what the correct information is. You do not need to be the clinic concerned to file one.

Who can request Anyone. Readers, clinics, physicians, regulators.
Response target We aim to acknowledge within five working days and to resolve factual disputes within fourteen.
Prices and details Verified corrections are applied directly and the page's review date moves. Small factual fixes are not annotated individually.
Substantive errors If a correction changes the meaning of a claim a reader might have acted on, it gets a dated correction note in the page body. We do not silently edit those.
Removal requests A clinic that asks to be removed is removed, without needing to give a reason.
What we will not do Replace a verified fact with a clinic's preferred wording, remove a lawful and sourced statement because it is commercially unwelcome, or accept payment in connection with any correction.

If you believe something here is defamatory, infringing, or in breach of Korean medical advertising law, say so in the email and we will review it on priority.

Sources

The regulatory facts cited across this site come from records we opened at the issuing agency, not from secondary summaries. The primary references we use most often are listed below, and each treatment page carries its own source list.

Primary sources
  1. U.S. Food and Drug Administration — Premarket Approval (PMA) database. Approval records for Class III devices, including hyaluronic-acid dermal fillers. accessdata.fda.gov — PMA
  2. U.S. Food and Drug Administration — 510(k) and De Novo databases. Clearance and classification records for energy-based aesthetic devices. accessdata.fda.gov — 510(k)
  3. U.S. Food and Drug Administration — Drugs@FDA. Approval and labelling records for injectable neuromodulators. accessdata.fda.gov — Drugs@FDA
  4. Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, Republic of Korea — Medical Devices: Approval Process. Korea's device regulator; Class III and IV devices are approved by MFDS itself under the Medical Device Act (Law No. 6909). mfds.go.kr (English)
  5. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — Travelers' Health: Medical Tourism. Public-health guidance for patients travelling abroad for care. wwwnc.cdc.gov
  6. American Academy of Dermatology — Fillers: Overview. Specialty-society patient information on what fillers do. aad.org
  7. Gangnam District Office — Gangnam Medi Tour. The district government's own multilingual medical-tourism portal. medicaltour.gangnam.go.kr

Each record above was opened directly at the issuing organisation and its content confirmed on September 12, 2026. Links are provided so a reader can repeat the check rather than take our word for it.

→ See also: Disclaimer — what this site is not · About this guide · Contact & corrections
Gangnam Clinic Guide is not a medical provider. We are an independent editorial publication. We do not practise medicine and we do not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment — nothing on this site is a recommendation that you undergo any procedure. Appearing on this site is editorial coverage; it is not an endorsement, certification, accreditation or guarantee of any clinic, physician or product. We do not book, broker, arrange or relay appointments, and we accept no commission, referral fee or payment for placement. Treatment decisions belong to you and a licensed physician who has examined you.
Disclaimer: Gangnam Clinic Guide is an independent editorial project. Nothing on this site is medical advice or an advertisement for any clinic. Verify all prices and medical claims directly with a licensed clinic before booking. Full terms: Disclaimer.