“Does this treatment really work?”
It is the question I hear most often in my consulting room, and patients from abroad ask it most precisely. On what evidence? In how many people? Over how long? I do not avoid the question. I believe the path for Korean medicine to reach the world runs through it.
Start with the numbers. The Korean Intellectual Property Office, now the Ministry of Intellectual Property, analyzed hair-loss patent filings made between 2002 and 2023 at the patent offices of Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Europe.
Korea accounted for 576 filings, or 42.9 percent of the total. Narrow the field to hair-loss patents based on natural materials, and Korea’s share is 50 percent, or 241 filings. Half of the world’s attempts to tackle hair loss with natural materials originate in Korea.
A patent count is a count of filings, not proof of efficacy. But numbers point to a direction. They say Korea is the country that has produced the most ideas in this field. The question is what comes next. For an idea to become a treatment, it has to be used on patients, and the results have to be recorded.
Patents speak of possibility. Patients speak of results.
The market is moving too. Last year Korea’s haircare exports reached $478 million, up 15.7 percent. What stands out is the direction of the growth. Essences applied directly to the scalp grew faster than shampoos. Whether this is the halo of the Korean Wave or the strength of the products themselves, we do not yet know.
And patients? According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, about 2.01 million foreigners received medical care in Korea last year, passing 2 million for the first time. Roughly 6 in 10 went to dermatology.
Yet there is no separate line in those statistics for hair loss or the scalp. Korea is a country that counts patents but does not count patients. The market is already moving, and it still has neither a name nor a statistic.
What is not counted has no name, and what has no name cannot be compared. Without comparison, investment, research and policy struggle to find a direction. Fields that carry a name, such as dermatology and plastic surgery, accumulate numbers year after year and grow into markets. Hair loss and the scalp have yet to receive that label. Attaching it is not difficult. We only have to start counting.
What I can speak to are my own clinic’s numbers. Foreign patients have increased steeply every year since 2023. We saw more than 5,000 in 2025 alone, and I expect more than 7,000 this year. These are figures we report to the government as foreign-patient records, and they are also captured in tax-refund records. They are not numbers anyone can embellish.
That is why evidence matters. We record the same indicators at the same time for every patient: photographs, hair density, hair thickness. Relationships build records, and records build evidence. We are organizing 21 years of clinical records, and we are conducting clinical research as part of a government-funded R&D project.
But that alone is not enough. What is needed is independent, multicenter, long-term observation. We are keeping that door open.
One more thing. These records should not belong to us alone. If every clinic could record by the same standard and share the results, Korea could become the country with the most data on natural-material hair-loss treatment. A country with the most patents becoming the country with the most evidence: I believe that is the road Korea should take.
There is also the question of price. Turkey drew crowds because it combined relatively low prices with a reputation for doing the work well. Where it is cheap and good, people gather. Korea cannot compete by being cheap. So there is only one way for Korea to show that it is good: evidence.
“Does this treatment really work?”
Here is how I now intend to answer: We keep improving the results, and we keep building the evidence. If you want to verify it, come and see for yourself.
The competitiveness of Korean hair-loss treatment must be proven not by price, but by evidence.
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Lee Moon-won
Lee Moon-won is chief doctor of Lee Moon Won Korean Medicine Clinic. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. — Ed.
khnews@heraldcorp.com