Skin clinics that promise to make their patients blemish-free, ageless and pearly white are proliferating in Seoul and vicinity amid ever-growing demand.
According to the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service, 59 percent of all 1,428 nationwide dermatology clinics are clustered in Seoul and Gyeonggi Province. The same is true for only 45 percent of internal medicine clinics and 43 percent of general surgeries.
No wonder then that many young graduates of medical schools plump for the lucrative fields of aesthetics and dermatology while other branches of medicine face a shortage.
Ninety-nine medical students applied for 66 specialist positions in dermatology in the first half of this year, an application rate of 150 percent that lags only behind ophthalmology (170 percent) and plastic surgery (157 percent).
But essential fields like internal medicine, general surgery, ob-gyn, and pediatrics are suffering a severe shortage of applicants, because they are physically demanding and do not pay nearly as well.
Sohwa Children's Hospital in Seoul, Korea's first children's hospital, no longer opens on Sundays and other holidays because of a shortage of doctors. Gachon University Gil Medical Center in Incheon suspended its pediatrics department last December and January for the same reason.
The situation is worse in provincial regions. A public health clinic in Sancheong, South Gyeongsang Province finally succeeded in recruiting an internist in May after putting up a vacancy advertisement five times over the course of a year for a job with an annual salary of W360 million (US$1=W1,337).
After three of its five emergency medicine doctors quit early this year, the Sokcho Medical Center in Gangwon Province scaled down operations of its emergency room. Only in April was it able to fill the three vacancies after offering a yearly salary of W400 million each.
And nobody wants to be a doctor on remote Ulleung Island, where job openings for an orthopedist and a family medicine doctor for a yearly salary of W300 million were posted nine times before a public health clinic there managed to recruit them. Both were retired and over 70 years old.
