Three reasons that hold up to scrutiny. First, throughput: a comprehensive checkup that would mean six separate referrals and three months of waiting in Germany or France is completed in one or two mornings. Second, volume: Korea runs national gastric and colorectal cancer screening programmes, and endoscopist volume correlates directly with detection rates. Third, price: the same imaging and laboratory work costs roughly 40 to 60 percent less than private clinic pricing in Western Europe, which is usually enough to cover the flight. What Korea does not change is the medicine itself — the test is the same test.

For a single-visit package such as Essential Baseline, Heart and Vascular or Hormones and Metabolism: three nights is comfortable — arrive, recover from the flight, examinations the next morning, fly out the following day. For packages with sedation or two on-site visits, including Executive Whole-Body, Digestive System and Cancer Early Detection: four to five nights. You cannot fly within 12 hours of sedation, so never book a same-day departure after an endoscopy.

Citizens of most EU and EEA states, the UK and Switzerland can enter Korea for short stays without a visa, generally after an online K-ETA authorisation. Requirements change, so we confirm what applies to your specific passport in writing before you book flights, and we issue a medical invitation letter if you need one. We do not give immigration advice beyond that; the authoritative source is the Korean embassy in your country.

Yes, and we encourage it for packages involving sedation — someone should accompany you back to the hotel. A companion can sit in on consultations with your consent and can join the results debrief call. There is no extra charge for a companion in any of our packages.

Most packages require 8 to 12 hours without food; the exact figure is listed on each package page. Plain water is permitted and encouraged — dehydration makes the blood draw harder and the ultrasound images worse. No coffee, no tea, no milk, no chewing gum, no sweets. If you smoke, stop at least two hours before arrival, because nicotine affects several of the values we measure. For a glucose tolerance test the 12 hours are strict; eating breaks the test and it cannot be repeated the same day.

Not on our instruction. We will tell you what each examination requires and give you that in writing to forward to your own prescribing doctor, who makes the decision. Blood pressure medication is normally taken as usual, with a sip of water. Blood thinners, insulin and oral diabetes drugs need an individual plan agreed before you fly. Biotin supplements must be paused for three days before any thyroid or hormone panel because they produce falsely abnormal results on common assays. Bring a complete list of everything you take, including supplements, with doses.

Three days of low-residue eating — no seeds, nuts, skins, whole grains or raw vegetables — then a laxative solution split between the evening before and roughly five hours before the procedure. The solution is unpleasant rather than painful; most people describe it as salty and the effect begins within an hour. You need to be near a bathroom for about four hours. We deliver the solution and a translated protocol to your hotel, and your coordinator checks in by message during the evening prep so you are not guessing whether the result is adequate.

Sometimes, and it must be checked before you book, not on the day. Many modern pacemakers, stents and joint replacements are MRI-conditional, meaning the scan is possible under specific conditions. Cochlear implants, some aneurysm clips, certain older pacemakers and retained metal fragments from injuries are absolute contraindications. Tell us the make and model of any implanted device during intake — the manufacturer card you were given is the fastest way. If MRI turns out to be impossible, we substitute an equivalent CT-based package or refund the difference before you travel.

Yes, including the parts that matter legally. Your interpreter is with you for the consent conversations about sedation and contrast agents, for every specialist consultation, and for the discharge instructions. They are not a translation app and they are not the clinic's staff — they work for us, which means their job is to make sure you understood, not to move you through the schedule. English and German are standard; other languages are arranged on request.

We name the clinic in your written confirmation, with its address and accreditation, before you pay the balance or book a flight — you always know where you are going before you travel. We do not publish clinic names on this site because we assign the facility that fits your specific package, dates and findings, and because our contracts are with several institutions rather than one. The commitment we make publicly is about standards: every facility we use holds Korean national accreditation and has an international patient department.

We escalate the same day rather than waiting for the report. In practice that means a specialist consultation is arranged within 24 hours, any additional imaging or biopsy needed to characterise the finding is quoted to you immediately, and you are told clearly whether this is something that needs action in days, weeks or months. You decide whether to pursue treatment in Korea or at home, and we prepare the file either way. We do not earn more if you choose Korea.

Four things. The original Korean reports as issued by the clinic. A human medical translation into English or German — not machine output, because a mistranslated negation in a radiology report is dangerous. A plain-language summary that separates findings into normal, monitor at a stated interval, and act now. And a referral-ready handover document written in the structure a European GP or specialist expects. Imaging is provided as DICOM files as well as PDF, so your own doctor can open the actual study rather than a flattened image.

Most laboratory values are available within 48 hours and we share urgent ones immediately. The timeline is driven by the slow components: histopathology after a biopsy takes seven to ten working days, genomic and epigenetic assays take three to four weeks, and the human medical translation plus physician review of the consolidated report takes a further three to five days. We would rather give you one correct document in two weeks than six partial ones in three days.

That is what the handover document is for. It states the methodology, the reference ranges used by the Korean laboratory, the device and protocol for each imaging study, and the findings in clinical structure. European physicians generally accept accredited foreign laboratory results, though some will repeat a specific test before acting on it — that is normal practice, not a rejection of the report. We will speak to your doctor directly if you ask and you give us written consent to do so.

Yes for everything we control: the diagnostics listed, the interpreting, the coordination, the translation and the debrief. It excludes flights, accommodation and treatment of anything found — each package page lists its exclusions explicitly. The only way the amount changes after you pay is if you add tests yourself, or if a biopsy taken during an endoscopy generates histology beyond what the package includes, which we quote before proceeding and never add silently.

Statutory health insurers in the EU generally do not reimburse elective screening performed outside the EU, so plan on paying yourself. Private and supplementary policies vary widely and some do reimburse preventive diagnostics abroad in part. We issue an itemised invoice with procedure descriptions in English or German, which is what an insurer needs to assess a claim. We cannot promise reimbursement and we will not pretend otherwise — ask your insurer before you book if reimbursement is what makes the decision for you.

Free cancellation with a full refund up to 14 days before your first appointment. Between 14 and 7 days we retain 25 percent, which covers the clinic slots already blocked for you. Within 7 days we retain 50 percent. Rescheduling once, more than 7 days out, is free. If we cancel — a clinic closure, an equipment failure, or a contraindication our physician identifies in your intake — you receive a full refund including anything you paid us for transfers, regardless of notice. Separately, as a consumer in the EU you have statutory withdrawal rights; these are set out in full on our cancellation page.

Card, SEPA direct debit, and the local methods your country uses — iDEAL in the Netherlands, Bancontact in Belgium, Klarna where available. Payment is processed by Stripe under PSD2 strong customer authentication; we never see or store your card number. All prices are charged in euros, so there is no exchange-rate difference between the price you see and the amount on your statement. Bank transfer is available for invoices above 2,000 euros on request.

Yes, and more directly than you might expect. We are established in Portugal, so the GDPR applies to us under Article 3(1) as it does to any EU company — not through the extraterritorial route — and our supervisory authority is the Portuguese CNPD. Sending your data on to the Korean clinic is a transfer under Chapter V, which is carried by the European Commission adequacy decision for Korea adopted in December 2021: no standard contractual clauses are needed. Your rights — access, rectification, erasure, portability, objection, withdrawal of consent — apply in full, and you can complain to the CNPD or to your own national authority.

Your assigned coordinator, the reviewing physician, the treating clinic, and the medical translator working on your report. Nobody else, and no marketing or analytics system ever receives health data. Health data is special-category data under Article 9 GDPR, which is why we ask for explicit, separate consent before you enter any of it and why we never collect it through the website contact form. Our payment processor receives your name, email, the amount and the reference of the package you bought — never your medical history, never an intake answer and never a finding, because the medical intake happens after payment on our own encrypted form.

Medical records and reports are kept for 24 months by default, so that a repeat checkup can be compared against your baseline. You can request deletion at any time before that and we will carry it out within 30 days, with two exceptions we are legally obliged to keep: invoices and tax records for the statutory retention period, and any record we are required to retain under Korean medical documentation law. Deletion requests go to our data protection address and you receive written confirmation of what was deleted.

Nothing non-essential runs before you consent, and that is literal: no measurement script is inserted into the page at all until you accept, rather than being loaded and then switched off. Without consent the site stores exactly one thing — your language, your cart and the record of this decision — which is strictly necessary for the service you asked for. If you do consent, we use cookieless aggregate statistics and Google Analytics configured without Google Signals or ad personalisation. We deliberately never load any advertising pixel on a package or test page, because the address of such a page would tell an advertising network which illness you were reading about.