Q. Why can I receive non-face-to-face diet prescriptions from a Seoul Korean medicine clinic even though I live in northern Gyeonggi?

Although telemedicine is not fully legalized in South Korea, revisions to the Medical Service Act allow non-face-to-face follow-up care for patients who have had at least one in-person consultation. For example, if you initially visit a clinic like Baekrokdam Korean Medicine Clinic in Seoul, you can continue treatment from northern Gyeonggi via medication delivery and video or phone consultations. From a Western medical perspective, diet therapy revolves around calorie metabolism and hormone regulation; non-face-to-face interviews can effectively assess insulin resistance or leptin resistance by analyzing diet patterns, activity, sleep, and stress. In Korean medicine, patterns such as spleen deficiency (biheo), phlegm (dameum), and blood stasis (eohyeol) are diagnosed primarily through inquiry (munjin) and tongue diagnosis (seoljin), both of which can be done via video—examining tongue appearance, bowel habits, appetite, and cold sensations provides reliable clues about spleen, liver, and kidney function. The inability to palpate the pulse or perform abdominal diagnosis (bokjin) is a clear limitation, but for diet cases emphasizing lifestyle correction, patient-recorded food diaries and symptom changes offer equally critical insights. In my experience, non-face-to-face patients often show higher engagement and better outcomes, so this option is worth considering despite the distance.