Stephen : : Hi. I’m Stephen, the chaplain and the English language interpreter of Gipum hospital. Robert here, who are over to Gipum hospital for his hernia to be repaired by Dr. Kang from Australia. So I really thank Robert for the interview. My first question is, how do you know Dr. Kang and Gipum hospital, and what made you come here for surgery which is not easy for you to make a decision enough.

Robert : So I was diagnosed with an inguinal hernia, and my natural response was to research on the internet. And as I got further into that are realized people can have problems with mesh, so I looked up meshless hernia surgery. And eventually found Gipum hospital on Google. And I was very interested in this site have website with Korean, Japanese and Chinese language but also English. And it has quite data outside. This is how I discovered the hospital.
 And continued to research I talked with Stephen who’s the person conducting the interview here. He has good English. And we communicated backwards and forwards about the whole process. Basically in Australia, there’s no meshless operation. All inguinal hernias require mesh in Australia. It might be there’s one surgeon that doesn’t do with mesh, but it’s very hard to get without mesh. So that’s the main feature with Gipum also Dr. Kang’s. His statistics or recurrence rate of inguinal hernia coming back is 0.5% which is very low. It's very low regardless of the method used but his is the tissue only method. And that really appealed to me that it was a half percent of recurrence rate. So after saying that, in Australia there’s no meshless surgery that meant if I want no mesh, I would have to go overseas. So I could go to USA or might be Europe or here in South Korea. But the cost in America varies enormously, some are very expensive. Here in South Korea, it’s quite competitive with surgery back in Australia. Australia has a good health care. Costs are often covered by the government. But if you want a private surgery, you need insurance or you have to pay yourself which is very expensive. But here is very competitive. So the fact is the low recurrence rate, competitive price, the flight wasn’t too far. After that, Steven really looked after me with everything, picked me up from the airport. Considering on me the foreign country that doesn't speak a lot of English, I have been very well looked after. So that's what really led me to come over here.

Stephen : Robert, what do you want to say to suffering hernia people all over the world?

Robert : I would recommend that people get their hernia’s fixed. I'm not a strong believer in watchful waiting, that’s for I did and more gone bigger, I had my hernia for about 2 years before I got fixed. And over time it did get bigger. To given idea on the size probably, this is from the outside looking at it, probably about that long, might be that wide, and it did, bulged as the big and the bigger, it gets the more uncomfortable. It isn’t little I only get worse. So you should do your homework, looking to mesh repair, check here Gipum hospital.
Another reason why I decided on Dr. Kang for the surgery is because he is also done over 10,000 hernia operations. I don't consider hernia operation to be mono operation and I want a very experienced surgeon to do it. So that's another reason why I chose Dr. Kang. Dr. Kang has done other tissue repairs easy going. Mesh repair is grown before but now he developed his meshless method for inguinal hernia, he is done it over 5000 times. They gave me more confidence to go through it.