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research

An archive is useful only if it is complete in both directions. What follows is Dr. Kang’s published record: six peer-reviewed papers, first author on five of them, each with its citation, its identifier and the group of patients it was actually carried out in. The last section states what the record does not contain, because that is the part a reader cannot check by reading the papers themselves.

01What is here, and how it was checked

The bibliographic details below, including authors, journal, volume, issue, pages and PMID, were confirmed directly against PubMed in September 2026 and are reproduced without alteration. Descriptions of design and findings are taken from that record and from the published abstracts.

Where a figure is not in the material available, it is left out rather than estimated. Numerical results are generally left to the papers, which anyone can obtain.

The six are given in the order they appeared. Where two carry the same year, they follow the order of the journal issues.

Two of the six report on the same cohort of 313 patients with nasal bone fractures, examined from two angles and published separately in the same issue of the same journal. They are two papers and one series. The figures are not added together, here or anywhere else on this site.

022017 · Closed reduction of the nasal bone, read from CT

The record

Citation

Kang CM, Han DG. Objective Outcomes of Closed Reduction According to the Type of Nasal Bone Fracture. Arch Craniofac Surg. 2017;18(1):30-36.

PMID

28913300

Author position

First author

Study population

313 patients treated by closed reduction of a nasal bone fracture

Design

Outcome graded on CT before and immediately after operation, analysed by fracture type, with complications reviewed at one month

Closed reduction is the standard treatment for a broken nasal bone. The fracture is manipulated back into position without an open incision, and whether it worked has traditionally been judged by looking at the nose afterwards. This study read the result from CT instead, and sorted the patients by the type of fracture they had arrived with.

Fracture type is not a formality here. A nasal bone can be pushed sideways, driven inwards, broken into several fragments, or displaced along with the septum, and those configurations do not behave alike under a closed manipulation. Nor does a nose that looks straight afterwards always have bone sitting where it should, and that discrepancy is what imaging exists to catch.

Sorted that way, the outcomes were not uniform. The position achieved after reduction, and the complications recorded at one month, differed between fracture types. A single figure covering all 313 patients would have reported that closed reduction is broadly satisfactory, which is true and of no use at the moment a particular fracture has to be treated.

What it supports: that a facial bone result can be read objectively from imaging rather than from inspection, and that an average taken across mixed types conceals the differences that decide a case. What it does not support: any claim about aesthetic surgery. This is reconstruction after trauma, judged on bone position, in patients who had been in an accident. It says nothing about malarplasty, facelift or foreign body removal.

032017 · The same 313 patients, asked what they thought

The record

Citation

Kang CM, Han DG. Correlation between Operation Result and Patient Satisfaction of Nasal Bone Fracture. Arch Craniofac Surg. 2017;18(1):25-29.

PMID

28913299

Author position

First author

Study population

The same cohort of 313 nasal bone fracture patients as the paper above

Design

The operative result set against the patient’s own satisfaction one month after operation, and analysed for correlation

This is not a second series. The two nasal papers appeared in the same issue of the same journal, one after the other, and draw on one group of patients. The first asks what the bone did. The second asks whether the person was satisfied, and sets the two answers side by side.

The two correlated. The agreement was closest in lateral impact type I fractures and least close in comminuted fractures. That the question was put at all is the part worth keeping: the relationship between the objective result and the patient’s own judgement was measured and reported rather than assumed.

What follows from it in practice is a habit of asking two questions at a review appointment instead of one: what the imaging shows, and what the patient has actually noticed. The second answer is not a softer version of the first. It is a separate measurement, and it is the one the person is living with.

What it supports: that the objective result and the patient’s own judgement can be set against one another and the relationship reported, rather than one being taken as a proxy for the other. What it does not support: it is not a satisfaction study of any facial aesthetic operation, and it does not show that any individual patient’s satisfaction can be predicted.

042017 · Pain after breast augmentation, recorded four times

The record

Citation

Kang CM, Kim WJ, Yoon SH, Cho CB, Shim JS. Postoperative Pain Control by Intercostal Nerve Block After Augmentation Mammoplasty. Aesthetic Plast Surg. 2017;41(5):1031-1036.

PMID

28791441

Author position

First author

Study population

44 patients who underwent augmentation mammoplasty with an implant

Design

Pain scored on arrival in the recovery room and again at 30, 60 and 120 minutes, with intercostal nerve block as the variable under study

Pain after an operation is usually recorded as an impression, or inferred from how much analgesia was asked for. This study fixed four moments and scored pain at each of them in every patient, so that what was being compared were the same points on the same axis rather than two recollections.

An intercostal nerve block is an injection of local anaesthetic placed alongside the nerves running between the ribs, given to interrupt sensation from the chest wall for a period after surgery. Whether it changes the first hours of a recovery is a question that can only be answered by measuring those hours, which is what this design sets out to do.

Four points separate three situations that a single summary merges: pain that starts low and stays low, pain that starts low and climbs as a block wears off, and pain that begins high and settles. Those are different clinical problems, and the phrase comfortable afterwards covers all three without distinguishing them. The scores themselves are in the published paper and are not restated here.

What it supports: that a subjective symptom can be put on a time axis instead of summarised, and that the shape of a recovery is a separate fact from its average. What it does not support: anything about pain after facial surgery. The patients had implants placed in the chest, the block was an intercostal one, and neither the anatomy nor the analgesia transfers to the face. No operation is described anywhere on this site as painless.

052018 · Buttock lifting, and a classification of descent

The record

Citation

Oh CH, Jang SB, Kang CM, Shim JS. Buttock Lifting Using Elastic Thread (Elasticum) with a New Classification of Gluteal Ptosis. Aesthetic Plast Surg. 2018;42(4):1050-1058.

PMID

29610954

Author position

Co-author, third of four. Not first author.

Study population

Patients undergoing buttock lifting with an elastic thread

Design

A lifting technique reported together with a proposed staged classification of gluteal ptosis

Correction

A correction to Table 2 was published on 9 July 2018, DOI 10.1007/s00266-018-1194-y.

This is the one paper of the six on which Dr. Kang is not the first author, and that is stated wherever it appears on this site. The lifting technique is not the part that carries over. The classification is.

Descent is ordinarily recorded as a word: mild, moderate, severe. A staged classification obliges someone to write down what separates one stage from the next. Once that is written down, two surgeons examining the same patient can disagree in a useful way, because they are at least disagreeing about a defined thing rather than about an adjective.

A technique is superseded sooner or later. A classification, if it is a sound one, outlives the operation it was written for, because the next author has to either adopt it or say why not. That is the kind of contribution this paper makes, and it is a contribution about definitions rather than about results.

What it supports: that grading a deformity is a decision about definitions, and that the definitions have to be published before anyone can argue with them. What it does not support: any transfer to the face. Gluteal ptosis and facial descent differ in their anatomy, in the structures holding tissue up and in the forces acting on them, and a classification written for one is not a classification of the other. Nor is the paper Dr. Kang’s to present as his own design.

062018 · The volume of a transferred muscle, followed on CT

The record

Citation

Kang CM, Shim JS. Volume Change of Pedicled Latissimus Dorsi Muscle Flap after Partial Breast Reconstruction. J Reconstr Microsurg. 2018;34(8):651-657.

PMID

30099736

Author position

First author

Study population

Eleven patients who underwent breast-conserving surgery with immediate partial breast reconstruction using a pedicled latissimus dorsi muscle flap

Design

Flap volume measured on CT and followed for five years

A flap is usually judged at the point where it looks settled, at three months or at six, and recorded as a result. This study did not stop there. The same tissue was measured on CT repeatedly, over a follow-up long enough to show what happened after the result had been declared.

Transferred muscle does not hold the volume it had on the day it was moved. Measured once, tissue volume is a photograph. Measured repeatedly, it is a trajectory, and a trajectory can be extended forwards. A surgeon who has watched transferred tissue over two years plans differently from one who has seen it at three months.

Imaging follow-up over this length of time is uncommon, for ordinary reasons. Patients are discharged, scans have to be justified, and a study reporting at six months can be written years before one reporting at two. The decision to wait is itself the design.

What it supports: that the volume of transferred tissue is a moving quantity, and that a result recorded at three months may not be the result at two years. What it does not support: it establishes nothing about how facial tissue behaves, and it does not validate fat grafting, a facelift or a removal. A latissimus dorsi flap in a reconstructed breast is not a mid-face, and the two are not compared here.

072021 · Muscle and fat, measured separately

The record

Citation

Kang CM, Shim JS, Park SH, Jeong YJ, Seol KH, Kwak SG. Volume Change of Muscle and Fat Portions of Latissimus Dorsi Myocutaneous Flap after Breast Reconstruction. Plast Reconstr Surg Glob Open. 2021;9(4):e3536.

PMID

33868878

Author position

First author

Study population

16 patients following breast reconstruction with a latissimus dorsi myocutaneous flap

Design

The muscle portion and the fat portion of the same flap outlined and measured separately, and followed over time

The 2021 study takes the previous question apart. A myocutaneous flap looks like one block of tissue and is ordinarily measured as one. Here the muscle and the fat within it were separated on the images and measured independently, in the same patients, at the same time points.

They did not change at the same rate. What looked like a single mass losing volume was two tissues losing it at different speeds. The consequence is that the shape of the result alters over time and not only its size, which is a different thing to plan for.

Outlining two components separately on every scan is laborious, and it adds nothing to the operation that has already been performed. It answers a question about what happens afterwards, which is the sort of question asked by someone who has decided in advance that the answer will change how the next operation is planned.

What it supports: the most transferable habit in the six papers, which is that tissue looking homogeneous on the table is a composite and should be measured as one. It is cited on this site as method and never as result. What it does not support: it validates no facial operation. The population was 16 breast reconstruction patients. A phrase such as a facelift verified by volume research would be a misreading of this paper, and it does not appear anywhere here.

08What is not in this record

None of the six papers examines a facial aesthetic operation. Not one concerns a facelift, malarplasty or foreign body removal. The populations are the nasal bone, the breast and the buttock, and the two nasal papers are reconstruction after trauma rather than aesthetic surgery.

There is no published outcome series for the work Dr. Kang now does. No case numbers appear on this site for facial foreign body removal, malarplasty or facelift, because no verified figures exist in the material available. A number that a reader cannot check is not worth printing, and a number that has been rounded up for a website is worse than none.

The six papers are cited here for how they were done, never for what they found.

This is stated rather than managed. Anyone who has been to three clinics has been shown a great deal of evidence that turned out, on inspection, to be about something else. Presenting breast volume research as proof that a facelift works would be that same move, performed more quietly. The population is therefore named every time one of these papers appears, and the papers are cited for their design.

What the record does establish is narrower, and it is true. On five occasions as first author, Dr. Kang chose to replace an impression with a measurement, a time axis and a division into components before judging a result. The rest of this site describes how that habit is applied to faces. It does not claim that these six papers prove it works, and no page on this site should be read as making that claim.

Checking this yourself

Nothing here needs to be taken on trust. Each entry above carries a PMID, and entering that number into PubMed returns the paper itself. An author search for Kang CM will also return these six, mixed in with work by other authors whose names abbreviate the same way, which is the reason the identifiers are given alongside. The journals are Archives of Craniofacial Surgery, Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, the Journal of Reconstructive Microsurgery and Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Global Open. If anything written on this site describes a paper in a way the paper does not support, the paper is the authority.

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