Surgical Tourism Is Thailand's Great Niche

A room like this in one of Pattaya's
Hospitals will set you back about $100
per night. How does that compare to
your own home country?It's a common secret that Thailand has good healthcare if you stick to the private hospitals. (The public hospitals... well, at $1 a visit, you get what you pay for.) I use Pattaya International Hospital (as compared to Bangkok Pattaya) because it is less expensive, and is right in the center of town (as opposed to out on Sukhumvit road).

For a decade now, it has been a popular thing to fly to Thailand to have cosmetic surgery done. An $8,000 breast enhancement in America will cost $1,500 in Thailand, plus you throw in a 2-week tropical vacation, and people still come home with $1,000 in their pockets.

Now, people are opting for major nonelective surgeries as well. In this article, a woman flew to Thailand to avoid having to pay $30,000 dollars for back surgery. Instead, it only cost her $3,500.

Doctors in Western nations are, of course, very angry. They don't like losing $30,000 to a doctor in Thailand. So it goes without saying that doctors in America, et cetera, will tell their patients how awful and dangerous and dirty it is to go to Thailand, and have their 1 or 2 horror stories that they've read about Thailand surgeries that they can pass along to their patients.

Now this is true: If you undergo a surgery in Thailand, you have to stick around until you are better. Just like in America, many patients have postoperative pain, infection, bleeding, or other minor complications. If you get yourself back to the hospital and get it taken care of, it's usually not a problem. However, if instead you decide to take a 20-hour plane ride, walk through airports while carrying luggage with stitches in, you are going to make yourself sick. It is not fair that you then get back to your doctor in the West to say, "Look what that Thai doctor did to me!!"

So therefore: Take some of the $25,000 you saved and find yourself a 6-star luxury hotel and check in for a few weeks. Hire a nurse from your doctor's office to come visit you at your hotel once a day for $20 a visit to change your dressings, take blood samples, or whatever else needs to be done.

Surgical tourism is definitely going to be a more and more important reason to come to Thailand in the future.

(And we won't even get into the soon-to-be-booming nursing home industry.)