Bangkok Pattaya five star Hospital

Bangkok Pattaya Hospital

In Pattaya Thailand the Bangkok Pattaya five star Hospital lives up to its reputation as a five star hotel.

by Jack Corbett

Click here to watch my video of Bangkok Pattaya Hospital

It is time that Americans learn the real facts. The U.S. has second rate health care while developing nations such as Thailand do a far superior job than Americans are getting. Health care in the U.S. is the most outrageously expensive in the world with no other country coming close. So here's the bottom line. Thousands of people worldwide are coming to Thailand for operations and other medical procedures at such significant cost savings that they wind up paying a fraction of what it would cost them in the U.S. even after they add in their international air costs. The best news is the standard of care will far outclass what most Americans will ever experience in their lifetimes--that is if you, like me, are an American who lives in Thailand or you can somehow outsource your more serious health care needs here. For instance, if you need a cardio bypass you might see if you can get your insurance company to cover you in Thailand. And if you aren't covered by private health insurance rather than lose the farm, fly over the Pacific and get it done here. What follows are a few facts about the Bangkok Pattaya Hospital and some of my own recent experiences here when I test drove the facilities. When you finish the video and this article I think medical care in the U.S. is a national disgrace and that you need to be coming to Thailand's Bangkok Pattaya Hospital for health care.

But first check out Bangkok Pattaya's video and pictures which I've borrowed from U-Tube to get the full picture of what you can expect here along with some great footage from both the hospital and Pattaya For detailed information you might also want to study the Pattaya Hospital's web site. Then read on to learn about my own personal experiences with Thailand's health care system including the operation I had at Bangkok Pattaya Hospital which required my being imprisoned (and you are not going to believe this) in a two room hospital suite replete with two balconies that provided me with a terrific view of the city from two directions at once.

Now imagine yourself in a hospital that doesn't even look like a hospital. Every floor is bright and cheery and there's not a trace of the usual hospital smells. There's large glass windows all around you letting in a lot of light. Downstairs is a book store that is just like the book stores you buy your books at in the shopping center. Sure, it's on a smaller scale but it's run by the same chain and if they don't have what you are looking for they can probably get it for you in one day. But they already have a lot of magazines and books to choose from. And since there are cute young women all around the place, dressed in white medical gowns, you know you can't be in a hospital because there's too many of them and too many of them are good looking. Most are smiling and anxious to please, so you can't be in a hospital, can you?

If your insurance plan is good enough, and mine is yet it costs less than half what it would cost in the U.S., your room is not a room. It's a large two room suite with enough room for several overnight guests to stay with you. You have a large wardrobe where you can store two weeks supply of clothing. There's a toaster and a microwave so when the nurses bring you your food, and you are sleeping, they won't wake you up like they do in the U.S. Instead they will return later and warm up your food in the microwave after you've woken up. Your t.v. is a 40 inch flat screen. After all, you wouldn't be in one of the best hospitals in Thailand if you had a little 19 or even a 32 inch t.v. to watch. Come to think of it, even when you stay in a four star Bangkok Hotel they won't give you that large a t.v. Want to smoke a cigarette? You might want to but the nurses won't want you doing it. In my case I had two balconies, one facing Sukamvit Road, the other facing Wongamat Beach where I own a condo. Either way the view if terrific and you can actually leave your suite to walk into the open air to get 100 percent of that view and smoke a cigarette without stinking up your suite.

This is not your room. It's only the guest bedroom--if you get the suite like I did.

hospital room This would have been my room with the guest room just for elbow room. It was on the corner so I could look straight out over the Gulf of Thailand in through one balcony, then look 90 degrees in another direction over Sukamvit Road. (all pictures from the Bangkok Pattaya web site--therefore not mine).

Hospital Room The first time I went to Bangkok Pattaya Hospital I went in to check out my eyes thinking I was a candidate for either lasik or SuperSight eye surgery. SuperSight surgery is a special procedure where special lenses are implanted into the eye which provide both distant and close up vision. According to Bangkok Pattaya Hospital it's a much more advanced procedure than lasik surgery although it costs two or three times as much. Before I could even get close to the hospital front desk I was greeted by a beautiful woman who came up to me, then escorted me personally to the front desk. There I was asked to produce my health insurance card. Five minutes later I was given a plastic hospital patient card with my name and a number on it and told this would be my number from then on. From that point on the hospital had me in its computer system. But let me repeat one little number. Five minutes. That's all it took before the pretty woman who had greeted me just inside the hospital front door was personally escorting me to the hospital eye center. She never left me until she left me safely in the care of one of the hospital employees dressed in a white hospital gown who stood behind the eye center desk with a number of other women. The woman took me to a chair, then she told me to wait a few minutes which turned out to be about 120 seconds after which she took me into a small room to check my weight and blood pressure.

Ten minutes later I was escorted to the eye doctor's office. There I was given a short eye exam. After seeing the doctor one of the white clad woman escorted me to a large room where a number of people sat waiting their turn. Within five minutes my name was called, and after walking up to the counter and paying my bill, I had the opportunity to walk a few feet to the left to collect my prescription from the pharmacy. This time there was no prescription since I had only had my eyes tested while being advised by the eye doctor about whether either lasik or SuperSight eye surgery was a viable solution for my vision problems. Had I not had enough cash, there were two atm machines only a few feet away. The entire visit as a new patient to the hospital had taken only forty-five minutes.

One year later I was an over night guest at Bangkok Pattaya Hospital. For years I had been having pain in my lower right abdomen at the exact same spot where I had two hernia operations back in the U.S. Since moving to Thailand the pains had subsided and then they had flared up again and finally had gotten much worse. I met first with one surgeon, and then I was transferred over to the care of Dr. Jimmy who prescribed for me a two week course of antibiotics in combination with anti inflammatory drugs. But unlike in the U.S. where I would have had to see a doctor first, then having to go to a pharmacy after getting my prescription my prescription was handed over to me just moments after I paid my bill. When I still was having pain two weeks after I had started taking the drugs, Dr. Jimmie prescribed another two week treatment after telling me, "I am trying out a conservative inexpensive treatment for you because the greatest possibility is you have an infection that has persisted for years and to get rid of it it's going to take a long course of antibiotics." But after another two weeks of antibiotics and anti inflammatory pills failed to stop the pain, Dr. Jimmy had me get an MRI.

The MRI cost me several hundred dollars but certainly not the $2500 it would typically cost in the U.S. After doing the MRI Dr. Jimmy told me I had a kidney stone that had become lodged in a duct at the base of my penis and that I'd have to be operated on. But first I did an ultra sound which confirmed the results of the MRI.

On the morning of my operation I had my Thai girlfriend drive me to the hospital on my motorbike. Bangkok Pattaya Hospital is only an eight minute drive from my condo by motorbike. At the hospital I was taken to a surgery preparation room to wait my turn on an operating room table and where my anesthesia started. There were a number of pretty nurses in the room when I got there. One of them told me that although she wouldn't accompany me to the operating room, she's see me right afterwards. Another pretty nurse came up to me on my left side, introduced herself and told me she'd be at my side while I was getting operated on. Another woman came over to my right side and introduced herself as my anesthesiologist.

"I can put you to sleep if you want me to," my advised me, "Or I can give you a local which will take away all feeling below your waist. You won't feel anything but you will be awake. It is up to you."

I thought about it for a moment before replying, "I want to be awake during the operation." For one thing I knew there was always a chance once you were put to sleep that you wouldn't wake up again. Not a big chance but a chance nevertheless. Secondly, I had once been operated on in the U.S. for a serrated septum in my nose and the doctors kept on talking to me while they operated on me. Although I hadn't felt any pain during the entire procedure I kept hearing these godawful grating noises as they chipped away inside my nose. Still, I had an interesting conversation with the doctors. Which here would be all the better since I would have all these great looking nurses to flirt with while the doctor operated on me.

"You won't even see the doctor, the anesthesiologist continued. "But I'm going to give you a sedative right now to make you relax. And I'm going to give you the anesthetic that will paralyze you from the waist down."

So I got both, the needle that paralyzed me from my waist to my toes and the sedative. After a few minutes I could feel nothing in my lower body. But the anesthesiologist asked me, "If you want more while you are being operated on I can give you more so you can sleep a little."

Which is about the way it all went in the operating room. I had the pretty nurse holding my hand to my left and I had the anesthesiologist to my right holding my other hand. Someone put a small hooded barricade near my lap which shielded me from having to watch Dr. Jimmy who was working on me. But there was a nearby t.v. monitor upon which I could watch the entire procedure, Dr. Jimmy put a small tube down my penis and it was through this slender tube that he operated in. Not only that, the tube contained a miniscule camera that went down my penis with the instrument that would destroy the kidney stone. Watching it all happen on television was like watching star wars. I could see the probe going down my urethra and into my bladder and then I saw it blasting away at objects that looked like meteorites. It was mind boggling. Intellectually I knew everything was very small but it all looked like gigantic stones being blasted apart. Although I kept watching the t.v. I kept looking around the room as I talked with the nurse and the anesthesiologist. After a few minutes the anesthesiologist asked me: "Want to sleep for awhile?" But there was no reason to sleep through any of it. There'd be lots of time for sleeping later.

When they had finished operating on me, they took me back to the operating preparation room, and sure enough true to her word, the pretty nurse who had promised she'd see me as soon as I came off the operating table was there. I'd say they left me there for a half hour, and then they wheeled me back to my suite.

My girlfriend slept in the same room as me. There was a pretty nurse who would come in during the early hours of the morning. I had a catheter up my penis. My lower extremities were no longer paralyzed which meant I could feel the pain. But in spite of it all I was looking forward to spending another night in Bangkok Pattaya. Instead I was released in the early afternoon. But first I was ushered into a much smaller cashier's office and given the paperwork for the procedure. Bupa, my health insurance provider had done a great job. The whole thing had some out to zero. And I even got a DVD of the whole operation as seen by that little camera that had gone down my urethra with the probe. There was a final check with my doctor two weeks later, and there was no charge for that either.

Make no mistake about it--the U.S. health care system is broken, perhaps irretrievably so. There's an old joke that goes like this. How many Republicans does it take to change a light bulb? The answer's ten. One to change it while the other nine reminisce about how good the old one was. This Republican party is living in the past and bound and determined to block any health care programs introduced by the Democrats while offering nothing in return. You got the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, the most modern fleet of aircraft carriers in the world, and believe it or not as of 2004 the U.S. still had 56,000 troops and 15,000 airmen in Germany, 33,000 in Japan, and 37,000 in Korea as of 2007 while the entire country went bankrupt and much of the world passed you by. I moved to Thailand for many reasons, the food, the climate, the slender beautiful women, the fact I could live cheaply on the beach, but the most important reason of all---I had found I could not find acceptable medical care even though I was paying over $3600 in health insurance premiums a year. And those were climbing 25 % annually. So don't believe the politicians who tell you we have a great system or that they are looking out for your best interests--look at the Bangkok Pattaya video above, the pictures on this web page, and if you get seriously ill, plan on getting very serious about looking at Bangkok Pattaya Hospital as a far superior provider of health care than anything you will be getting in the U.S.

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