(Sources: SeoulBeats & personal scan)
See here for the details. Alas, with just 1 hour available then there’ll be little opportunity to do more than summarize what I’ve already written in my “Gender Advertisements in the Korean Context” posts unfortunately (see the right sidebar), but hopefully my very visual presentation will be a much more fun introduction to the topic then reading those tens of thousands of words would be. And it’ll be great to finally meet Seoul-based readers, and to hear your own opinions face to face.
What’s more, it’ll also be my birthday next Tuesday. So you have to come!
The Grand Narrative 
It’s not really related to the lecture, but I happened to have surgery on my foot this morning to remove an ingrowing toenail (see here for the graphic results!), and it was extremely painful, the surgeon not using quite enough anesthetic. As I complained to my colleagues about that later though, some of them told me that this seems to be quite normal for Korean surgeons. Have any unlucky readers also found that to be case?
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I’ve heard people say that about Japanese doctors, and that Japanese doctors had informed them that Americans are pain-sensitive babies. hahaha! I have no idea if any of this is true. It seems contradictory with the other meme that Americans can take such “big” (usually only slightly larger) doses of OTC medications because we are “strong,” something that I have personally heard said repeatedly, as a reason why Japanese expats bring their own or pay ridiculous markups for imports of aspirin and ibuprofen and cold medications or whatever at Japanese grocery stores. (That is, the underlying thing — Americans wanting higher doses — is a constant, but the reason given — weakness or strength — can be contradictory.)
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Congrats on the RAS lecture gig. I’d tell you to break a leg, but you’re already down to just one foot. ;)
I don’t know about medical surgery, but I know by way of my s.o. who is a dental student that among dental practitioners in Korea there is a tendency to think that American dental patients are given too much local anesthetic. She suggested either American patients were wimpy or the American dentists were just treating them too gingerly.
Shortly after I had my appendectomy I was asked if I wanted a painkiller, which I turned down because I thought it safer to endure the pain if I could instead of risking addiction. My understanding, though, is that in many Stateside hospitals they initially give that to you whether you ask for it or not. I know that’s different from your question about the anesthetic, but I wonder if any difference might reflect a philosophy toward automatic pain reduction as well as insurance usage that in the US tend toward padding bills.
Have fun with your talk. I’d love to attend if I were in Seoul that week. If anyone records it in any way, I hope you’ll make it available online.
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Thanks for the congratulations, and I’ll see what can be done about a video recording. As for the local anesthetic, one important thing to consider is that – from what I’ve repeatedly heard at least – Korean patients don’t complain about their treatment quite as much as say, their US counterparts, so given the choice Korean dental patients may well prefer to have as much anesthetic as wimpy Americans.
Not that I want to give the impression that Koreans never complain to doctors and hospital staff of course (see here for an example of precisely that), and in fact my own timidity is partially to blame in my case: when the doctor checked what parts of my toe I could feel, when he got to the base of it and I said I could feel there, I instantly thought that surely if I was getting part of the root of my toenail removed, then I most definitely shouldn’t feel anything there? But rather than ask for more anesthetic (albeit already painful enough to get injected with), I meekly assumed that he knew what he was doing, and got duly got punished for that soon after.
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Yeah, but for me in the U.S., minor medical treatments were expensive enough that I did my own ingrown toenail surgeries, in the manner suggested by my old man, with no anaesthetic beyond a couple stiff drinks. :-/
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