Beauty from Afar

I added Curtis J. Schroeder’s Afterword for Beauty from Afar today, along with fussing with links on the table of contents page and updating the “About” page to reflect the fact that I am available for work and that I am open to the partnership and advertising possibilities inherent in this site.

Curt, as far as I know, is still group CEO at Bumrungrad International in Bangkok, Thailand; and I am still grateful for his kind words, written in 2006.

Yes, putting up the Afterword now is out of order. I thought about putting it up last. But I decided that anything that was really about the book and gives people the reasons why they might want to read it, ought to go up before I started posting actual chapters.

Besides, I love the Afterword and it makes me feel good to read it again.

So … next, I’ll put the jacket copy up, somehow; and then the Introduction … and then, I’ll probably start letting people know about the site and, little by little, post the 12 chapters. I’ll make pretty ebooks, in various formats, once I have pulled all the text out of the Quark file and massaged it sufficiently.

This is another place where links to Chapters 1-12 and the Introduction reside. I am finding it best to provide both the reader and myself with some alternatives as I move along with this project. As it has developed, this page seems to be useful for listing each of the “pages” as I add them.

Introduction | Seeking Beauty from Afar

Introduction (Part 1) Stumbling upon an open secret

Introduction (Part 2) Jurassic Park, it’s not …

Introduction (Part 3) A Nose Job in Iran?

Introduction (Part 4) It’s so … Foreign

Introduction (Part 5) Competition for the United States

Chapter 1 | Medical Tourism: Here, There and Everywhere Part 1

60 Minutes and Medical Tourism … Part 2

Vignettes … Didi, Fabio … Part 3

Patients Going Abroad: A Burgeoning Industry … Part 4

U.S. Healthcare and Spiraling Costs … Part 5

Dear Dr. Rubinstein … Part 6

100,000 Fellow Travelers — or More … Part 7

Tip of the Iceberg — and a Trend … Part 8

Medical Tourism: A Moving Target … Part 9 (End of Chapter 1)

Chapter 2 | Comparing Quality, Comparing Costs … Part 1

News Gets Around … Part 2

A Warning Lives on,  Mostly Unheeded … Part 3

Sticks and Stones … Part 4

American Doctors Speak Out … Part 5

Point, Counterpoint … Part 6

The Best of Both Worlds … Part 7

If You Can’t Beat Them … Part 8

Prices in the United States vs. Abroad … Part 9

Chapter 3 | A Brief and Selective History of Medical Tourism Part 1

The Pioneers of Medical Travel … Part 2

Build It and They Will Come … Part 3

Origins of Term Medical Tourism (cont.) … Part 4

The Media Imprimatur … Part 5

Chapter 4 | You’re Going Abroad for…What!? … Part 1

Cosmetic Surgeries and Procedures … Part 2

Eyelids, Foreheads, Noses and Peels … Part 3

Breasts, Arms and Tummies … Part 4

Body Lifts and Butts … Part 5

Hair Implants, Otoplasty, Bariatric, Dental Work … Part 6

What Else is Out There? Non-Cosmetic Procedures; Conclusion … Part 7

Chapter 5 | Research, Research … and More Research … Part 1

Medical Travel and Cosmetic Surgery: Top Resources … Part 2

Patient Support Sites for Medical Tourism … Part 3

(January 2006)

A Bangladeshi, a Brit, an Arab and a New Yorker were sitting in a doctor’s waiting room …

What could be a preamble for an off-color joke is in reality the tangible face of the medical-tourism phenomenon. What brings together such a rich melange of people to a medical facility thousands of miles from the comfort of their homes? In fact, their motivation is as diverse as their cultures, languages, and geography.

The Bangladeshi seeks an alternative to the less-developed medical system in his own country. He comes for quality.

The British woman undergoing radiation therapy for her breast cancer is side-stepping the long queue in England?s socialized health-care scheme. She comes for access.

The affluent Emirati from the United Arab Emirates is seeing four doctors in one morning with a personal interpreter/valet in tow and a steaming cup of Starbuck’s coffee in his hand. He comes for service.

Then there is the New Yorker. What on Earth is he doing here? What has possessed this 55-ear-old upper-middle-class stockbroker from one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world to leave behind arguably the most sophisticated medical system on the planet to have surgery in Asia? He is one of 40 million uninsured Americans who is self-employed, not rich, not poor, old enough to need his prostate removed but not old enough to qualify for Medicare. And he does not want to pay the high price for private medical insurance. He comes for price.

But the Americans can not be sold on price alone. Our friend from New York is a case in point. Of course, the price was 80 percent less than that of the U.S. quotes he got. But being a day-trader, he knows his research. He knows what he wants — a cutting-edge minimally invasive laser procedure for prostate removal by a surgeon who has done the most of that procedure in the world, in a hospital that is of international standard that could take him right away. His search brought him to Asia.

He came for quality?; and access?; and service; ?and price.

As an American who has lived in Asia for over a decade, I can safely say that we Americans are a demanding bunch. And it is truly a leap of faith to trust your health to a doctor that you have never met at a hospital you have never seen in a country you have to find first on a map.

This is the value then of Jeff Schult’s excellent guide to the world of medical tourism. Jeff has scoured the hot-spots of medical tourism, talked to the patients, Googled the Internet to within an inch of its life, and taken the plunge himself into overseas health care. The result is a balanced, unbiased, and thoughtful guide for the informed consumer. Beauty from Afar is an entertaining and practical handbook that includes important considerations that any prospective medical tourist would? and should? consider before making the “leap”.

I thought I knew a lot about the subject, having lived it for 10 years. Jeff has opened a whole new world of possibilities, and he has made me a student again. I am convinced more than ever that medical tourism is not a fad. It is not about “cheap” health care. It is about smart, well informed people looking for quality service at a reasonable price in a world where distances and lines drawn on a map are not the barriers they once were.

Decisions about your health are important. Read this book. Do your own research. Make smart, informed decisions. Maybe you can narrow the leap of faith to be more of a hop.

Healthy Travels!

Curtis J. Schroeder
Group Chief Executive Officer
Bumrungrad International
Bangkok, Thailand

DEDICATION

For Kellen Michael Schult,
the best son a dad could have
– then,  now and always.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to simply ask anyone who’d like to be acknowledged to bop over for dinner some night as soon as I’m settled in again somewhere, assuming that you don’t mind eating take-out. We can sit around and talk and I can thank you properly and fulsomely. But it would be a pretty empty gesture unless I left some directions or at least an address, neither of which I can anticipate right now. The only thing I know for sure is that we will do this again some time. That?s fair warning for those who found that me writing a book turned out to be more entertaining than they would have thought.

I started writing acknowledgments when the book was only half done, which seems pretty presumptuous, but it was about at that point that I realized that there really would be a Beauty from Afar and that there would be people to thank for that. First, thanks to everyone who always believed that I would write a book — Mom and dad, my brothers, assorted girlfriends over the years. That was a lot of damned pressure, you know? No wonder it took me until I was 49! But it’s okay, I forgive you enough to thank you lots, for everything, all along the way. In particular, I owe Frances Kuffel for saying that I would be good at this in such a way that I believed her, and for her encouragement, faith, and support as a friend. I have called this faith a curse, on occasion, but thank her for it regardless.

More graciously, perhaps, I’d like to thank Susan Campbell, who gave me the idea that going to Costa Rica for dental work might be a fine magazine story, which it was, and Stephanie Summers, the best managing editor that the Hartford Courant Northeast magazine could hope to have had, for publishing that really long story. Whoever heard of a 10,000-word piece about dental work?

Next, chronologically, I want to thank Beth Bruno for introducing me to my agent, Linda Konner, and Linda for persevering on my behalf through the perhaps inevitable 20 or so rejections, until finding an editor who agreed with us that this book was a good idea. That editor, Debora Yost at Stewart, Tabori & Chang, later told me that there are a lot of books about cosmetic surgery and that they say all the same things (which explains, somewhat, the rejections). But she was the only acquisitions editor who read my proposal and realized that my book was not about cosmetic surgery, but was much more about traveling abroad for medical care, a topic about which she knew almost nothing. She warmed to it, and I am grateful. Many thanks also to Lisa Andruscavage, whose questions and assiduous copy editing both sharpened and smoothed my best early efforts.

I am humbly grateful to all the surgeons, doctors, and medical professionals around the world who contributed to this project by sharing their knowledge and experience, and hope that they find the result did them justice individually and collectively. I have a heightened appreciation, in particular, for the deep, shared commitment to well-being that they hold universally, wherever they may practice, under whatever conditions.

Finally, I’d like to thank the patients, too many to count, who shared with me their experiences in traveling abroad for medical care and cosmetic surgery; and I hope, as I know they do, that the publication of Beauty from Afar will illuminate the path along which they traveled and show the way for others to come.

(9-15-09) added original Table of Contents

(9-14-09) Since it is increasingly apparent that physical copies of Beauty from Afar are becoming more scarce, I’m commencing to put the text online. Like, starting now, really.

I do not yet have pretty e-books made up. I’m working from an ugly Acrobat document I managed to make out of the original Quark document of the book that I wheedled away from my publisher in 2006. I don’t even know how I managed to get that far, since neither version of Quark I have will open the publisher’s file now. InDesign won’t do it either. If someone with a Mac and Quark 6 or so wants to see if they can help me out with a conversion … well, I’d be grateful.

Meantime, I’m pulling the text out and pasting it to a text file that will eventually work great as a flat format e-book. And, as I go, I’ll post pages. Today, we have the original author’s note and the foreword.

That’s the cover of the book, at right. I didn’t pick it. And, in fact, I’m still a little embarrassed by it, for obvious reasons. I’ve been told by a lot of people I shouldn’t be and they’re probably right. “Sex sells.” What’s to be embarrassed by?

Still …

Here is the never-before-published cover sheet I did for the original book proposal. You can tell I had a different notion of what the book was about.

(February 2006)

Throughout the research and writing of Beauty from Afar, I communicated with and consulted many surgeons, doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals. I talked to and consulted many more people than those mentioned or quoted in this book, having had to pick and choose each step of the way. Readers should not assume that any particular doctor or medical facility has my particular endorsement just by fact of their appearance in these pages. That which serves the general narrative of this book should not be taken as more than that. In no way do I mean to suggest, for example, that the surgeons to whose work I refer are better at what they do than many others who are unmentioned. They are offered as illustrative examples and are among those who have the most experience in medical tourism. From their collective individual experiences, from the published news reports about medical tourism of the last decade, from extensive research online, and from collateral reading of what few books touch upon the subject, I was able to assemble a more general picture of what individual prospective medical
tourists should seek out, and what they can expect to find.

Similarly, that I mention companies that cater to patients who wish to travel abroad for surgery should in no way be construed as endorsing the quality of their services. Again, they are examples, a few chosen from many fledgling enterprises. It is my personal judgment, based on lengthy experience as a journalist and virtually none with startup companies, that those I selected have a stronger chance than most of succeeding in the long run; but I have no way of knowing for sure.

In the interests of full disclosure, readers should also know I have accepted no remuneration, fee, or discounted services from any business or individual mentioned in this book. I owe meals to a couple of people, perhaps, but owe favorable or preferential treatment to no one and made no bargains regarding treatment in return for interviews or access to facilities. Many of those I did interview were allowed to review draft text of Beauty from Afar to check the accuracy of my reporting, and I thank them all for their time and diligence. The end product is solely my responsibility.

Many people have asked me why I chose to write about the specific countries that I did. Fine low-cost medical services and talented, highly qualified surgeons exist in many others. All along, however, I was determined to provide information about countries that are currently the most accessible and inviting to medical tourists, the ones where the U.S. and European markets are targeted and courted. Certainly, one can find excellent plastic surgeons and medical facilities in many countries that are unmentioned in this book. If you prefer going to one of them, don’t take my neglect as a sign of my disapproval. Do your homework, choose wisely, and have a great trip.

Jeff Schult
Author, Beauty from Afar