James Choi최희준

Reporter

Medical Insights Korea

James Choi covers Korean healthcare broadly for Medical Insights Korea, ranging across hospital medicine, health policy, and the clinical specialties, and reporting from primary material rather than from secondary accounts of it.

Covers: Korean healthcare system · Health policy · Hospital medicine · Screening · Gallbladder · Korean health system · Prostate Cancer · Haemorrhoids
Record: 21 written
Contact: chjandhot@gmail.com

Written by James Choi

News · Haemorrhoids

Haemorrhoidal disease came with a 24 percent higher rate of dementia over 15 years, and the authors say it is a marker, not a cause

381,031 Koreans, a median 15.5 years of follow-up, and a hazard ratio of 1.243. The group who had their haemorrhoids treated came in at 0.925 — and that interval, unlike the heart failure one, does exclude 1.

James Choi20 Oct 20266 min read

News · Prostate Cancer

Same stage, same risk, different treatment: where a Korean man lives predicts what is done about his prostate cancer

Capital and urban residence meant more surgery for localised disease and more intensified systemic therapy for metastatic disease. Non-capital and rural residence meant hormone therapy alone — and the association survived adjustment for age, PSA, grade and stage.

James Choi20 Oct 20266 min read

FAQ · Prostate Cancer

The check-up centre offered me a prostate MRI. Is it worth paying for?

In 618 Korean men who did exactly that, testing PSA first would have made nine out of ten of the scans unnecessary — and missed one cancer out of nine.

James Choi16 Oct 20265 min read

FAQ · Screening

Is a more expensive health checkup package better?

The thing that rises most reliably with the price is the radiation dose. Whether anything else does has not been shown.

James Choi10 Oct 20265 min read

News · Prostate Cancer

Men who had repeated PSA tests before diagnosis got surgery. Men who had none got hormone therapy

45.6 percent against 33.8 percent for surgery; 42.3 against 59.7 percent for hormone therapy. The cost difference came from how long the systemic treatment ran, not from its monthly price.

James Choi8 Oct 20266 min read

News · Varicose Veins

Korea treated 1.87 million people for chronic venous disease in eleven years. Open surgery fell by a third while catheter ablation rose forty-two-fold

National claims data show the patient count rising 53 percent and the operation being replaced. The share of those patients who had an ulcer halved over the same period — which is a change in who is being treated, not only in how.

James Choi3 Oct 20267 min read

News · Haemorrhoids

One in six adults screened in Korea had haemorrhoidal disease, and childbirth is what separates women from men

Prevalence was 16.6 percent among 194,620 people examined by colonoscopy at a health check. Women outranked men overall — but only the women who had given birth.

James Choi2 Oct 20265 min read

News · Screening

Korea's organised screening closed the income gap. The screening people buy for themselves did not

Breast screening data from 2009 to 2021 separate the two channels. In the government programme, less-educated women participated more. In individually initiated screening, the advantaged did — by almost two to one.

James Choi28 Sept 20267 min read

FAQ · Kidney Stones

Are kidney stones really worse in summer?

Korean data answer this more precisely than a season. The delay between a hot day and the hospital is under five days.

James Choi23 Sept 20264 min read

News · Screening

Korea built the world's first national lung cancer screening programme. Five years in, uptake doubled and the income gap did not close

Low-dose CT screening reached 51.2 percent of eligible heavy smokers by 2023, up from 24.7 percent. Higher-income groups took it up more consistently throughout.

James Choi22 Sept 20266 min read

News · Screening

Korean mammography halved breast cancer deaths. The same women were also half as likely to die of everything else

In 8.3 million women the adjusted mortality rate ratio was 0.43. The study's authors published a second number alongside it that shows why the first cannot be read at face value.

James Choi20 Sept 20268 min read

FAQ · Screening

Is a Korean comprehensive health checkup worth having?

A checkup is a bundle, not a test. Korea's own national programme contains one test that lowers cancer death, one that does nothing, and one that produced the largest overdiagnosis epidemic ever recorded.

James Choi16 Sept 20269 min read

News · Screening

What the premium checkup package reliably buys is radiation. Price and dose correlate at 0.812

An analysis of 190 comprehensive programmes at ten Seoul university hospitals found the overnight package averaging 24.08 mSv — for people with no symptoms. Two programmes with the same stated purpose differed by 2.1 times.

James Choi13 Sept 20267 min read

News · Kidney Stones

Korea's stone patients follow the weather. In 687,833 records, the lag was under five days

A time-series analysis of six Korean cities found urolithiasis presentations rising with daily mean temperature and falling with humidity. The effect arrives fast enough to be planned for.

James Choi12 Sept 20266 min read

News · Screening

A Korean comprehensive checkup is a bundle. The evidence inside it is not uniform

The Cochrane review of general health checks found no effect on mortality across 233,298 people. Korea's own national programme contains a test that halves the odds of dying of gastric cancer. Both findings are correct, and the bundle contains both kinds of test.

James Choi11 Sept 20268 min read

FAQ · Gallbladder

Does having my gallbladder removed increase my risk of cancer?

Korean national data covering 715,872 operations shows a raised cancer rate afterwards. The shape of that rise over time is the part that answers the question.

James Choi11 Sept 20266 min read

News · Thyroid

Korea's thyroid cancer epidemic followed income upward. So did the correction, and the deaths did not

Higher-income Koreans were screened more, diagnosed more and suffered more surgical complications. Lower-income Koreans died more. When the country stopped over-screening, the higher-income group stopped first.

James Choi2 Sept 20266 min read

News · Thyroid

Korea's cancer registry told a journal that a study of rising thyroid cancer deaths had not measured mortality

The paper reported thyroid cancer-specific mortality rising from 0.76 to 2.70 per 1,000 person-years. The national registry's reply says that is a case fatality rate, and that population mortality fell from 1.06 to 0.80 per 100,000 over almost the same period.

James Choi2 Sept 20266 min read

News · Gallbladder

Gallbladder surgery in South Korea: what the evidence says about who gets operated on, how safely, and what happens next

Korea removes three times as many gallbladders as it did fifteen years ago. This is what the published evidence establishes about that operation, and where it runs out.

James Choi1 Sept 20268 min read

News · Gallbladder

Korean national data keeps finding new diseases after gallbladder removal. When those diseases appear tells a different story

Cancer, diabetes, kidney disease, depression: study after study from the National Health Insurance Service reports raised risk after cholecystectomy. In the two that separated early risk from late, the excess was concentrated in the first years and then disappeared.

James Choi1 Sept 20267 min read

News · Gallbladder

Cholecystectomies in Korea more than tripled in fifteen years. The national study points at CT scanners

Nationwide insurance data shows the age-standardised rate rising from 67.7 to 211.4 per 100,000. Its authors name increasing computed tomography use as a probable primary cause.

James Choi1 Sept 20265 min read