Day 28 Wednesday August 20th

[Jordan Markel]

We met the driver at 7:30 am, this time on a mission to see Bangkok General Hospital. The hospital shocked me right off the bat. First off, it was in a prime location in the center of Bangkok, where the sky train and subway system intersect. There were beautiful water fountains decorating the surrounding of the hospital. Inside the lobby, there was a piano being played, accompanied by a harp. We were told to wait on large, comfortable leather couches, where I immediately began to doze off for a nap. I was awoken by an American looking and speaking man dressed in an all black business suit. He was a retired general surgeon from the United States who did a lot of global medicine work and now worked as the Director of Foreign Affairs at the hospital. His job was to oversee that the foreign patients in the hospital felt comfortable. He took Zayar and I on rounds with him and we met many patients who had traveled to Bangkok General Hospital for a better deal in health care. This is called medical tourism. We were told that around forty percent of their patients at one time are medical tourists. The most interesting case was a a man who worked as a nurse in the US and had a faulty heart. He traveled to Bangkok General Hospital to receive treatment that is unavailable in the U.S. At BGH, they were able to inject undifferentiated stem cells directly into his faulty heart valves, in hopes that the cells would grow into healthy heart cells. This patient seemed extremely happy with the availability and affordability of care. Another interesting case highlighted the disadvantages of medical tourism. This patient was a Thai native who's daughter and son in law live in the US. When she became ill, her daughter and son in law traveled to Bangkok and payed cash(only $5,000) for her to have her gallbladder removed at BGH. However, complications, infection, and a heart attack arose. The patient had been in the ICU for two weeks by the time we met her, and her bill, accountable to her son in law and daughter, had reached over $120,000. Had her daughter and son in law allowed her to receive her care at a public hospital, the care would have been free but of lesser quality. However, now that she was at the private hospital, she was too ill to be moved and her bills were piling high. This scenario highlighted the importance of balancing realistic advantages to disadvantages in approaching an individual's health care.