HealthAbroad.net: Point of View

… if you get operated in India, according to South African medical consortium offering cut price operations in India.

Under this plan, the patient would be responsible for the travel costs and the scheme would ensure that the medical treatment would be continued in South Africa after the overseas trip. The consortium has tied up with medical practitioners in India after research showed that the cost of surgery being 33% cheaper in India.

On arrival in India, the patients would be chaperoned through immigration and taken to the hospital for medical checkups. A family member will also be accomodated free in the hospital’s hotel wing.

Philippines’ Department of Tourism (DOT), under its Medical Tourism Program is offering packages which include high quality and afforadable medical procedures, ranging from eye and dental procedures to cosmetic surgery and preventive tests. Also included is a holiday of their choice at the country’s tourist islands such as Cebu, Palawan and Boracay.

Packages have been broken down into “Wellness and Health Holidays,” “Beauty Holidays,” “Vision Plus Holidays,” and “Smile Holidays.” And include the usual compliment of vacation features- hotel accomodation, city tours, spa treatment and golfing tours.

The Tourism Authority of Thailand did not pay me to put this up here, but it carries some useful information.

1) It offers highly competitive cost advantages and expertise even in relatively new medical fields such as the application of stem cell technology. Medical costs in Thailand are about 1/8th the cost of a similar procedure in the US.

2) The number of foreign patients seeking health services in Thailand is on the rise. 630,000 in 2002 to 970,000 in 2003.

3) In terms of health service clients, Japan heads the list. Following it are the US, the UK, China and Taiwan, Germany, Indochina, India and the Middle East.

4) The private hospitals in Thailand are comparable to those in the top categories in Singapore, a leader in medical tourism and hi-tech healing.

5) Most hospitals are equipped with modern and state of the art medical tools.

6) Some of the popular medical treatments are heart surgery, kidney transplant, basic surgery, cancer treatment and cardiac surgery. Thailand is also popular for plastic surgery.

As always, HealthAbroad.net requests you to do your research before going overseas for a medical procedure. Across the world, many true centres of excellence which offer professional low cost services are in existence. However, an equal or greater number of unscruplous agencies, doctors and hospitals are in it to make a quick buck. So please be smart, but be careful.

Keeping with Singapore being the numero uno in cutting edge medical treatment, the New York Times recently reported that a local business claimed to be the first company to produce human embryonic stem cell lines commercially in a way that made them suitable for clinical tests. Researchers can buy vials of stem cells online from ES Cell for $6,000 each.

The article points out that the Bush Administration’s institutionalized reluctance to promote stem cell research has meant that many top American scientists have left for Singapore, which is luring them with tax holidays and incentives.

In the 1980s and 90s, focussing on the electronics market Singapore pole vaulted into the bracket of high income countries. Now faced with declining returns from electronics, the city-state is hedging its bets on biotechnology and early signs indicate that the country is well on its way to becoming a hub of biotechnology.

Singapore has already managed to lure big drug companies. Factories pumping out pharmaceuticals for Merck, Pfizer and Schering-Plough now generate about 18 billion Singapore dollars, or $11.4 billion, in annual revenue, and account for 5 percent of the Singapore economy. But Singapore wants companies to do more than make drugs here. To persuade them to conduct basic drug research and development as well, Singapore offered to pay as much as 30 percent of their building costs. At least 30 companies have responded, including the Swiss company Novartis, which has opened an institute to develop drugs to fight tuberculosis and the tropical dengue virus.

Singapore officials say they have spent 1.5 billion dollars on biotechnology since 2000 and have budgeted an additional 1.44 billion dollars over the next five years to finance development of new therapies and drugs.

Ever thought of a mobile dental clinic? In Las Vegas? On the strip? I hadn’t, so i was somewhat amused but quite overcome by the ingenuity of this venture as reported in the International Herald Tribune.

The mobile units are courtesy of On- Site Dental NV, a Las Vegas company founded seven years ago by Chris Davenport, who is not a dentist but an entrepreneur. On-Site Dental owns two trailers, each fitted with two dental offices in which dentists and hygienists see about 1,000 patients every Monday through Saturday in the parking lots of 11 casinos in Las Vegas. Most of the patients are employees covered by the casinos’ dental insurance plans, which pay up to 80 percent of the costs of most dentistry. No plans pay for cosmetic work, like veneers and tooth capping, which may be needed for the glistening smiles.

Really, a fantastic article and a must read even though it might not strictly come under medical tourism.

By the look of things, Singapore is pulling out the stops to reinfornce its prominence as a medical tourism destination. In the recent past, Thailand and India have undertaken steps to re-double their efforts to attract medical tourists.

Faced with stiff competition from the two Asian countries, the city-state has now hired a top American consulting firm to map out strategies to attract more medical tourists. The Ministry of Health said in an issued statement that the objective of this collaboration was to “strengthen our national competitive strategies as well as draw on their relevant experience and expertise in developing healthcare strategies specific to medical tourism worldwide.”

Singapore, known for its cutting edge medical services at afforadable rates and dynamic cultural milieu hopes to attract one million medical tourists by 2012. According to a report in Singapore’s The Strait Times newspaper reported on Friday that the city-state drew 374,000 medical tourists in 2005, up 17 percent from 320,000 the previous year.

Check out this video clip on medical tourism by KMOV, a local television station in St. Louis, Missouri. Very good!

The clip documents the experience of Susan Thomas who decided to go to Belgium for knee replacement surgery after her insurance company refused to cover the $40,000 cost of having it done locally. Susan expresses her surprise at how far superior medical care in Belgium was to what she had expected. Understandably satisfied at the quality and economy of medical care, Susan Thomas calls it the best thing she ever did, the best trip she ever took.

The entire cost for a 3 week trip which included side seeing and a trip to London, first class round-trip airfare cost for 3 people was under $15,000.

According to the news report, India, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia were the port of call for 1.3 million medical tourists last year, most of them from Europe. The clip also quotes a CEO of a third party facilitator as saying that while heart bypass procedures in the US cost between $60,000-120,000, they can be had for $6000-8000 in India and Thailand with matching or even better quality of care.

According to an article in The Times of India, “a great number of pathological samples from the United Kingdom, UAE, and neighbouring countries like Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh are being outsourced to cities like Delhi for specialised tests.”

Explaining the cost-benefit to client hospitals SRL Ranbaxy chief operating officer Janak Singh Bajwa says, “The outsourcing opportunity in the UK alone is 450 million pounds. That works out to about Rs 3,600 crore. Typically, outsourcing tests to India means a saving of about 30-40% for them which works out to a sum of almost 140 million pounds. That’s a huge saving for them.”

The process is quite simple- samples are collected, put in special packages which maintain required temperature and flown by air to labs in big Indian metropolises such as Delhi and Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay). Tests reports are sent back online with the hard copy following a day later. The entire process takes about 72 hours or 3 days.

Fantastic article in The Guardian on the growth in nip and tuck tourism in South America and how Brazil is gaining ascendancy in the field. Considering how little is written about the medical tourism industry in South America, this is a much needed article. Having spent time in Peru, I can vouch for the fact that medical tourism is already massive and growing in South American countries particularly Argentina, Brazil and some Central American nations. Why they loose out in coverage is possibly due to the language barrier as a result of which the local media machinery does not feed into the mainstream English language media.

“For decades Brazil has been considered a thriving centre for cosmetic surgery, and it is now at the heart of a growing wave of surgery tourism, with foreigners jetting in for a few days on the cutting board and a week’s recuperation on the beach. After the United States, home to 5,000 registered cosmetic surgeons, Brazil comes in a close second, with around 4,000.”

The Brazilian culture of sun, sand and samba and a general acceptance of plastic surgery in society, means that there is a thriving domestic market for cosmetic surgery. According to the article, although figures are hard to come by the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery says that Brazil is not too far behind the $12.4 billion Americans spent on plastic surgery in 2005.

With the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery in Brazil and aided by the advent of new techniques such as “minimal incision” and “less invasive” operations, “walk-in clinics are starting to democratise access to cosmetic surgery.”

Brazil has had a headstart on the US in terms of new techniques for cosmetic surgery. For example, silicone breat implants, outlawed in the US for 10 years, have been used in Brazil since 1993.

The article winds up with a list of the new procedures being practiced in Brazil.

Threadlift- The new walk-in answer to a facelift. Making a small incision around the temple with local anaesthetic, the surgeon implants a series of threads, tightening loose skin. The operation takes about an hour and is said to be like having a tiny “umbrella” opened under your skin.

Liposelection- Brother of liposuction, which uses ultrasound to reshape knees, buttocks, hips and “male breasts”. The unwanted fat is liquefied and removed causing, it is claimed, “minimal pain, swelling and bruising”.

Internal bras- Developed in Brazil since 1988, the internal bra is part of the new wave of “minimal scar” surgery. The surgeon implants a small piece of gauze under the skin, which lifts the breast as if the patient was permanently wearing a bra.

Jet peel skin rejuvenation- Skin rejuvenation promises to “pressure wash” your skin in a series of quick, “virtually painless” sessions. Regular “maintenance” sessions are required so as not to lose “skin clarity” its makers say.

According to this article, Russians, flush with money and increasingly conscious of their health and well-being are the latest targets of the Singapore medical industry. While a majority of Russians flock to Europe for medical treatment, Singapore expects to count on its well earned reputation for being a hub for hi-tech healing as well as traditional chinese medicine, the latter having caught the fancy of many Russians in recent years.

The procedures are also much cheaper than in Russia or Europe. A simple process such as tooth extraction costs 5 times more in Russia than in Singapore.

While numbers on Russian patients are not available, anecdotal evidence suggests that there is an uptrend. The article quotes Prem Kumar Nair, General Manager-Raffles Medical Group says, “In 2005, we saw several thousand Russian patients. Comparing the first half of 2005 and 2006, we have seen a growth rate of more than 200 per cent.”

An increasing number of Russians are travelling across the world and healthcare providers in Singapore believe that the potential market for Russian medical tourists is huge.