physician
Most surgical biographies are written forwards, from school to speciality to practice, as though the sequence explained itself. This one is easier to read backwards. Start with the patient standing in the consulting room now, someone who has already been to three clinics, who was told each time that the problem was minor, and who still has the problem. From there the earlier choices stop looking like a career and start looking like a preference.
01Reconstruction came first
His published work was carried out in the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, School of Medicine, Catholic University of Daegu. The operations that formed him were not cosmetic ones. They were cleft lip and palate, and the rebuilding of faces after injury, tumour and burn.
Cleft lip and palate is a particular education. It is rarely a single operation. By the time a surgeon meets the child for the second or third procedure, the anatomy has already been altered, by growth, by scar, and by whatever the previous repair decided, so the plan has to be made from what is actually in front of you rather than from a diagram. The result is not judged by shape alone. It is judged by whether the lip seals, whether speech develops, whether eating is ordinary, and by the twenty years that follow. A photograph taken at six months will not tell you any of that.
A surgeon who starts there learns two things early. The first is that the interesting problem is usually the second or third one, not the first. The second is that what the patient says about the result is evidence rather than a courtesy.
022017: three papers, one habit
Three papers appeared in 2017 with his name first. Read together they are less interesting for what they found than for how they were built.
The first was about pain. Patients having breast augmentation with an implant received an intercostal nerve block, and rather than record that they were comfortable afterwards, he recorded a pain score at four fixed moments: on arrival in the recovery room, and at thirty, sixty and one hundred and twenty minutes. Forty-four patients. The impression that the pain settled quickly became four points on a line, which can be set against somebody else’s four points.
The second was about bone. Three hundred and thirteen patients with a nasal bone fracture underwent closed reduction, and the result was read from CT rather than from inspection, sorted by the type of fracture, so that the question stopped being whether the operation went well and became which fractures end up where.
03The third paper
The third paper used the same three hundred and thirteen patients and asked a question the first one could not answer. It set the operative result on CT against what the patients themselves reported a month later.
The two correlated. The agreement was closest in lateral impact type I fractures and least close in comminuted fractures.
The habit is in the checking rather than in the result. A surgeon can take it for granted that a bone in the right place on a scan is a good outcome for the person living with the face. He collected the patient’s own judgement as a separate measurement, set it against the imaging, and reported how the two stood.
The practical side of this practice follows from that. The operation is planned against what the person actually came in for, and the parts of the face that are working normally stop being a resource to be spent.
A caution that applies to all six of the published papers. Their populations are the breast, the buttock and the nasal bone. None of them examined an aesthetic operation on a face. They appear here as the background to a way of working, and for no other purpose. They are not evidence that a facelift, a malarplasty or a foreign body removal produces any particular result.04Layers, and the speed at which each one changes
Two later papers took the same approach to tissue volume. In 2018 he tracked, on CT, what happened to a pedicled latissimus dorsi muscle flap used to reconstruct part of a breast: eleven patients, followed for five years. In 2021, with colleagues, he stopped treating the flap as a single thing: the muscle portion and the fat portion were measured separately, in sixteen patients, and they did not behave the same way.
That is the kind of finding that changes how a surgeon looks at any soft tissue. A block of tissue that appears uniform on the table is not uniform over time. Its components settle and shrink at different rates. What you see at three months is not a smaller version of what you will see at two years. It is a different composition.
A face is layered in the same way: skin, subcutaneous fat, SMAS, retaining ligaments, deep fat compartments, periosteum, bone. They are not one material, they do not age at the same rate, and an operation that treats them as one is making a bet it has not examined. That reasoning comes from anatomy, not from the breast studies. What the breast studies supplied was the habit of dividing a thing into its parts before measuring it.
05The ordinary qualifications
The qualifications that count are the ordinary ones. He is a board-certified plastic surgeon and a co-director of UVOM Plastic Surgery. Six of his papers are indexed in the peer-reviewed literature, and he is first author on five of them.
06A face that is already full of something
Somewhere between reconstruction and the present, the work narrowed onto a problem that arrives already several steps in: faces that have been hardened, lumped, inflamed or distorted by something injected into them years earlier.
The first thing to understand about these patients is why they are still unwell. Not every injected material answers to a dissolving agent. Hyaluronic acid filler responds to hyaluronidase, and where the material genuinely is hyaluronic acid that injection is often the right first move. Polycaprolactone-based products such as Ellansé are not broken down by hyaluronidase at all. Neither are calcium-based or collagen-based semi-permanent fillers, nor grafted fat, nor lifting threads, nor the industrial substances that were injected into some faces decades ago.
Steroid treatment is the other common route, and it behaves in a way that is easy to misread. It can reduce inflammation and shrink a nodule. The lump becomes smaller, the face looks better for a while, and the material that provoked the inflammation is still exactly where it was. When the effect wears off the nodule returns, and repeated injections leave marks of their own: thinned skin, lost fat, an irregular surface.
By the time these patients arrive, several rounds of treatment have already happened somewhere else. That changes the operation completely. This is no longer filler removal in the sense the phrase is normally used. The material sits inside scar and adhesion, the boundary between it and normal tissue has blurred, planes that should separate cleanly are stuck together, and facial nerve branches, the infraorbital nerve, vessels and the orbital septum run through or beside the field that has to be opened.
Opening the face is not the hard part. The hard part is deciding how much can come out, what has to be left, and which plane to work in, judged against the anatomy actually in front of you rather than the anatomy in the textbook, because earlier procedures have moved it.
As much of that decision as possible is made before the operation. Ultrasound shows the plane and the depth of the material, whether it is a discrete nodule or diffuse, whether inflammation is active around it, and where it lies in relation to normal fat and to the structures that have to be preserved. CT is added where bone is part of the question: previous contouring surgery, erosion of bone beneath an old implant, the position of the malar complex. Neither will name the product that was injected. The clinic’s stated protocol is to say so to the patient rather than to gloss it.
What follows is a conservative principle, and it is worth putting plainly because it is the opposite of what is usually advertised. The aim is not to take everything out. The aim is to reduce the material that is causing pain, inflammation and deformity while leaving normal fat, nerve and skin intact. Where material has spread through several layers, some of it may be left deliberately, or the work divided into stages. Complete removal is not a promise anyone can make about a face with adhesions, and attempting it is how hollows and nerve injuries are produced.
07Removal is not the end of it
A space that has been occupied for ten years does not close by itself. Take the material out and what is left is the shape of the problem: hollowing where volume used to be, skin that has been stretched and no longer retracts, fibrous irregularity, and deep tissue that had already descended and was being held up by the filling.
This is why the facelift came back into the work, and why it belongs here as the operation that follows removal rather than as a separate speciality. The two halves are one problem. Preserve normal structure while removing, then re-organise what has been left slack.
As the clinic describes its own technique, the facelift is carried out in the deep plane: skin, SMAS and the fat layer are raised as a single block rather than separated, and the retaining ligaments are released so that the deep tissue can be repositioned instead of the skin being pulled. No technique has been shown to suit every face. A 2025 systematic review (Vayalapra S, Guerero DN, Sandhu V, et al. Ann Plast Surg. 2025;95(5):582-589) covered 47 studies and 10,766 patients and found SMAS-based and deep plane operations comparable in safety. Only one study compared them directly, reporting better midface rejuvenation with the deep plane technique, which is too little to generalise from; the review’s own conclusion is that the choice should be individualised. Here it is made from where the descent actually is, and from how much adhesion earlier surgery has left behind.
Sequence is its own decision. Where inflammation is active, where the material is widespread, or where skin perfusion is already compromised, removal and lift are separated in time. Where the material is localised, the inflammation settled and the dissection required is within reason, they may be done together. The clinic’s stated protocol is to establish the inflammatory state first, to map bone, material and soft tissue as three separate findings second, and only then to choose between one operation and several.
08The clinic
UVOM Plastic Surgery is on Dosan-daero in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. Dr. Kang is a co-director of the clinic, alongside Dr. Jung Su Lee.
One record belongs to the clinic rather than to either surgeon. Since 1999 UVOM has carried out medical outreach in three forms: invited surgery in Korea for patients brought from abroad with a non-profit partner, overseas medical outreach, and outreach to migrant workers living in Korea. The countries include Mongolia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nepal, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Chad, Libya, Morocco, Algeria and Haiti. The conditions treated include cleft lip and palate, benign tumours, burns, scar contracture and skin disease. This is the institution’s record, held since 1999, and it is not presented here as the personal record of any one surgeon.
09The name of the operation kept changing
Cleft lip and palate. Reconstruction. Facelift. High-difficulty foreign body removal. Written out like that, it looks like four specialities and a career that could not settle.
It is one preference, held consistently. Each of those operations is the kind where the anatomy has already been altered by somebody else, where a photograph will not settle whether the result is good, and where the second attempt is harder than the first. The name of the operation kept changing. The patient he chose stayed the same: the person whose problem does not resolve easily, who has been to several places and still has the complaint, and who now says they do not know where to go.
Reconstruction taught him how to rebuild. The facelift taught him how to re-position. Foreign body removal is where the two meet.
10Who this practice is for
The practice now has three parts: facial and infraorbital foreign body removal, endoscopic malarplasty, and deep plane facelift. They are not three specialities. They are one problem approached from three directions, and a single patient often needs more than one of them. Endoscopic malarplasty is carried out by both directors of the clinic, and the attending surgeon is confirmed at consultation.
In concrete terms, the consultations that make sense here tend to begin in one of these situations.
- Material injected years ago whose product name is unknown or uncertain, now causing swelling, hardness, discolouration, visible irregularity or pain.
- Hyaluronidase given once, twice or more with no lasting change, which usually means the material is not hyaluronic acid.
- A nodule that softens after a steroid injection and returns some months later, each time inside a thinner envelope of skin.
- A face that has had contouring surgery, fat grafting, threads and filler in some order, so that the normal planes no longer match a standard map.
- Hollowing, laxity or surface irregularity that appeared after material was removed somewhere else.
- A cheek that descended after malarplasty, where the question is the soft tissue rather than the bone.
It is not for everyone, and two situations are worth naming. Where infection is active, stabilising it comes before any removal. Where the material is known to be hyaluronic acid and hyaluronidase has not yet been tried, there is no reason to begin with an operation.
There is a third case, harder to put politely. Anyone who wants a single appointment, a single operation and a guaranteed number will be better served elsewhere. What is on offer here is an assessment that separates the face into layers before it proposes anything, a plan that states what will be left before it states what comes out, and a willingness to say that part of the work should wait.
- The record
- Certification
- Board-certified plastic surgeon
- Position
- Co-director, UVOM Plastic Surgery, alongside Dr. Jung Su Lee
- Academic affiliation
- Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, School of Medicine, Catholic University of Daegu, where his published work was carried out
- Peer-reviewed papers
- Six, first author on five
- Listed practice
- The clinic lists his practice as endoscopic malar reduction and foreign body removal
- Name forms
- Chang Min Kang in the journals; Kang Chang-Min in the clinic’s own records
- Clinic
- UVOM Plastic Surgery, 138 Dosan-daero, Gangnam-gu, Seoul