SNM023: Medical Tourism and the Joys of International Healthcare

speaker 0: 0:00 the benefits of getting medical treatment abroad on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by fresh books. Accounting and bookkeeping mistakes destroyed thousands of small businesses every single day. Bookkeeping doesn't have to be hard turned to the number one invoicing software for small businesses. Start for free today at serve no master dot com Backslash Fresh Books Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated?

If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams. Now thin, you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast, where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host island. I live on well off the beaten path.

Not only do I live in a developing country, I live in a rural part of the developing country on an island very far away from the nearest major city. Every day there's a flight between me and that major city. It's about a 40 minute flight, no problem, and in an emergency. You can even book a private point Anytime people have a medical problem, there is a local hospital. That's okay for something more serious. You go to the big city.

Recently, I had to go meet a client, someone I was working with on a project in Thailand while I was there, I decided, was a great opportunity to experience the medical care there. The great thing about Thailand is that they have Hans of first rate hospitals. They have an amazing selection of really, really quite quality hospitals. I decided to take advantage of that situation and see exactly what an experience would be like going for a check up at one of these hospitals.

I haven't been to a check up in about two years, so it's a little bit worried. I needed a tune up. I had lost at that point about £50 so I wanted to see where I could work next, where I need to develop what I needed to work on Nexus first taking four of my body. What's amazing is the quality of experience I got for less than $200. I got a chest X ray. I was scanned by seven or eight different doctors. They checked my eyes.

They checked my ears, they checked my lungs. They checked everything. At the end of about two hours, I'd met with five doctors in about 12 nurses all over this hospital. You never get an experience like that when you go to the hospital for a check up when you go to your doctor for a checkup. They gave me so many more tests that I receive in America for 5% of the cost. Everyone was very knowledgeable. The English speaking was amazing.

At the end of my whole experience, they took me for a final meeting with the doctor, and she said my blood pressure was too high and that they were worried. I would need to start going on blood pressure medications. I merely said, You know what? I want to retake that test. We re checked my blood pressure and turns out everything was fine. There's two important things about this story. The first is that medical care in other countries is phenomenal.

As long as you look for a hospital, that's J. C. I credited. That means it has an international accreditation that's been tested and verified over three years that it means a certain level of standards that cross national borders. You don't want any domestic qualifications as any country, then they're just relative. What you want to know is it's absolute quality compared a worldwide. The second lesson to take from my experience is that you really need to understand your medical situation.

I knew that something went wrong when I was taking that first blood pressure test because I started looking at the numbers. I got a little more nervous, and I manually raised my blood pressure just by being nervous by watching the numbers and like, Oh my gosh, it's getting higher and higher and higher that happen to me because I just been writing a book about blood pressure for the last three weeks for a client.

It was on my mind it was distracting me, and it affected my test results. This happens to people in America all the time as well. People all over the world go in for a check of the doctor, and they get a bad blood pressure reading. It's very normal. This is why you want to ask her reading at the beginning and the end of your session and really take three readings over the course of a day.

I do consider that to be a little bit of a wake up call for me that my blood pressure even had a little bit of a risk. So I bought a blood pressure, was seeing myself that now lives in my house. I check my blood pressure every day. I exercise every day. I'm very conscious of that.

I've taken more, more control of my medical destiny when you're living in another country, when you decide to live somewheres world's ideo, you have to make the decision to take control of your medical destiny. In America and in the West, we have this tendency to pass the buck. I'm not in charge of my health. That's my doctor's job. I'm not in charge of taking care of my body, extending my life. There's tons of medical care here to take care of me.

Many people in America choose to have a bypass rather than exercise and diet rather than lose weight. We have open heart surgery. Open heart surgery is so common that it no longer even seems that overwhelming. It reminds me off in Apollo 13 when someone says You're going to the moon doesn't set seem routine and he says, Tom Hanks, brilliant. There's nothing routine about going to the moon, and that's how I feel about heart surgery.

If you're not proactive about your own health, you will run into problems and you'll run into more and more complexities as you go to other countries. When you're choosing, where you going abroad or going on a trip? Are you making any plans? The smart move is to look in advance to see what the quality of medical carrier receivers I've been in many countries, and sometimes the countries we think of the best are actually the worst.

Everyone I know has ever had medical care in Japan has greatly regretted it. A friend of mine, her arm broke. Where we're living in Japan. They set her arm, and when she went home to her country in the west, they told her they set your arm wrong. It'll never worked right again unless we re break it. They had to re break her arm.

I know someone else who got the flu in Japan and they made a lot of mistakes with her medical care, and I had an experience. What? Her doctor told me that I was gonna be dead in 24 hours unless he performed a procedure. Turns out he made it all up just as an insurance play. And in fact, the procedure nearly cost me my life. We think of Japan is the future. But when it comes to medical experience, they're very similar to England in the 16 hundreds.

I would never recommend going to any hospital in Japan. I don't know anyone's ever had a good experience there. Now they might have good hospitals that I've never heard of, but everyone knows had a bad experience there. While everyone I know who went to Thailand had an amazing experience, Thailand is at the cutting edge for many procedures, many surgeries, and it's a really, really great place to go where I live. I'm not in Thailand. I live somewhere very rural in a country that's not that close.

But I can be at the hospital I want in Thailand anytime I want. Within 12 hours. If I have a major emergency, the path will be a little bit different. My next door neighbor for five months ago, had a heart attack, he immediately was transported to the city. That's about 40 minutes away by plane because they live on an island. There's no other way to get there now.

There is a hospital in my island, but he made the right choice to go to the better hospital little bit further away. They put a stent in his heart. He was back five days later and it looked like nothing had changed. He was totally healthy, totally recovered. There is amazing medical care. As long as you take a little bit of responsibility for what's happening. You want to check what's available to quoted care, available the different experiences.

When my son was born, I let my girlfriend decide where we were gonna have it. She's the one who's gonna be in the emergency room. She's one who's in the process of having the baby. I gave her several choices. I said, We can have the baby here on this island. We can go to the neighboring island that has a bigger city and better hospitals, and we could even go to the big city. That's a 40 minute flight away.

It's a little more complex because you can't fly during the last few months of pregnancy. So we'd have to go there in advance, create a whole plant. But I was okay with that. I wanted to do the right thing. It's my girlfriend, my son. I want the best for both of them. She decided to have the child on her island entire experience. Two nights in the hospital, nurses up the wazoo, Doctor. Everything costs us a little under $450.

My friend, who had a baby in America even with his massive insurance, ended up paying more than I did for the birth of his daughter. Prices are very different when you go to other countries. Now, I recently talked to my girlfriend about when we have our next child. We definitely wanna have more. She doesn't want to reuse that hospital. And I totally understand why. I think she went a little too casual with this one. It wasn't the hospital that I would have chosen.

I would have chosen one of the more expensive ones. But even if we go to a major city, the price isn't gonna go above $600 for the same experience. Having a baby having medical care in other countries is a lot cheaper. Many of the doctors here were trained in the West. They were trained at the same schools with the same quality of care, using the same procedures as the doctors used to going to that charge. 35 10 20 times more money.

Most people assume that medical care experiences doctors and developing countries and foreign countries Air. Terrible medical care in America is not nearly as high as you think it is. Depending on different scales, America often ranks somewhere around 37th for medical care. That's not exactly the top of the pile. When you go to other countries, you discover that a lot of your beliefs were misinformation. I grew up thinking that doctors in America were amazing because of capitalism.

Then I went to England, where I had a major incident. I went to the hospital through the merge room, had an entire experience where I ended up meeting one of the best doctors in the nation, and it cost me nothing. I assumed that socialized medicine would be garbage until I experienced it. A lot of our beliefs, a lot of the things we think we know about medical care, traveling and experience. They're just false information. Experience and research beats everything else.

You might decide you never want to go to a doctor in Asia. You don't wanna go to doctor in South America. You only want an American or European doctor, and that's fine. Procedures in America still costs more than 10 times more than the same procedure in Europe. You can go to an amazing private clinic in Switzerland or Sweden or Germany wherever you want in Europe, and you'll save at least 60 present on the cost.

You can fly first class both ways and still spend less than just going to a doctor in America. Don't make assumptions do research wherever you decide to live. The first step is to understand their medical system. How does their insurance system work? Do you need insurance? Does travel assurance work there would even accept? At many places you go. You have this travelers insurance that covers any medical problem. Guess what? That doesn't work. They don't accept it. What actually happens? You go to the hospital.

You got a broken leg on your ski trip. You have to pay for everything yourself out of pocket, and then the insurance policy eventually reimburses you. If you have do all your paperwork correctly and make no mistakes. Trusting in the system you come from is fine. We want to take the time with our serve. No master minds that to understand how things work in other countries. When you're looking at a country to visit her move, start by looking at the infrastructure of their medical system.

How does their medical system rate worldwide? Do they have hospitals that R J C I credit? Are they international in credit? There are three J. C. I credit hospitals near me, and I know exactly where they are. So if I have to do a major procedure, if I need something big, I know where to go to get the best care available. If I have time, I know where I can go to even better hospitals. One country away.

Now most of us most people in America actually live a little bit rural. We don't all live in the big city. I could get better medical care here that I could in the bush in Alaska, in the middle of nowhere relative to where you would live somewhere rural in America. I could get amazing medical care here. It's not a problem now. One thing that's very important. You have to change your lifestyle and your mindset when you move.

When you move to another country, I live somewhere where hospitals aren't that available. I'm not five minutes away from the emergency room. I live 30 minutes away from the hospital on my island. I live an hour from the airport, which is another hour from the city where there's big hospital. So I'm three or four hours away from a major hospital. So for any type of major accident or major incident, either have to do a lot of waiting or go to the local clinic.

There are limitations for emergency emergency medical care. That's the real area of limitation. Most disease in America. Most health problems in America Most of our causes of death in America are preventable, almost all caused by smoking, drinking and obesity. If you take control of your health destiny, you can extend your life. You can increase the quality of your life and you could make major changes at an airport last year, they weighed me and they said I weighed £272.

They way everyone, when you go into smaller airplane to make sure the weights balance between the two sides and the front back of the plane, the plane was small enough, and I was heavy enough that I could have tipped the tip the wing over and crashed us if they didn't know where to put me. When I saw that I was £272 at five foot nine, I really realized I had to make a change, how to make a dramatic change, and I pushed my weight down.

I've lost about £50. I still need to lose a lot more. I need to get down to between 1 82 100 I know that right now I'm in the two twenties or so. It's not nearly good enough. I've hit a little bit of a plateau because we moved house and a bunch of things were going on recently. Need my girlfriend have started the second face, my second push to push down that next 50 which involves me right in my exercise bike every day, which involves me.

Check my blood pressure one or two times a day were really on top of it because you can't trust someone else with your life. So many people get overweight, don't take care of their health. And the only thing keeping them alive is taking pills every day, going to the doctor every day. Being your hospital, you're not really in control of your life. And you let these things happen that are very devastating.

When I was younger about five or six years ago, I had a major heart problem through the series of events involved, a lot of stress, some financial problems. As faras business partners and project I was working on, all came to a head.

I ended up in the emergency room with a major heart incident, having stared down the I and thinking that it was it that I was gonna die in my early thirties of a heart attack and seeing the look in the doctor's eye in the emergency room, I felt real fear. I had to change something.

They told me that for the rest of my life I would take three heart pills every day that for the rest of my life, the only thing keep me alive would be this tether, this chain, these pills. And if I ran out of pills, I would die. I do not want to give control of my life to someone else. I don't want to live in a situation. I can't get to the doctor.

I can't get to the pharmacy or there's some type of natural disaster and there's no access to a pharmacy. I simply die. I don't want to do that. I started training. I worked out every day for the next six months and wean myself off. Those pills with a massive series of tests at the end of the doctor confirmed that didn't have to make those heart pills anymore. He was astounded. Sometimes we get locked into this idea that the answer to every problem is a pill.

70% of Americans take a pill every month, 50% take to stay a lot, and even more Americans. There's a large percentage that take more than three medications every month to stay alive. We're dependent on medications. The pharmacy companies control us, and we don't realize that oftentimes we can solve the problem by changing our lifestyle for you. go to the core of the problem. We can fix the problem rather than the symptoms. Our fear of moving to another country is often because we're used to being coddled.

The majority of Americans are overweight or obese. Something around 90 million Americans now have prediabetes or diabetes caused by eating habits, not the diabetes type one that you're born with but the kind you develop because you over it and don't take care of yourself were so unhealthy. And that's very limiting When you are overweight, when you have massive health problems, visit another country becomes scarier and scarier and scarier. I wouldn't live where I do right now if I still smoked.

If I was still massively overweight, if I was older and older and still having these problems, I made a student. When I moved here, I said, I have to take control of my health Destiny. No one is responsible for my health anymore, so I've begun exercising every day, taking care of my health. I've lost a lot of weight. I still need to lose more because I want to get to that perfect level.

I'm doing pretty good halfway to my goal and This is the point where it's very tempting to quit and very tempting to plateau out. But I'm not gonna let that happen. I mean, my girlfriend just had a big talk last night where I explained to her that I really need her support. I get distracted when I'm working. I'm recording these podcasts. I'm working on a new book.

I get very distracted by work, and I can go and work 12 hours because I love what I d'oh without exercising. This morning she woke me up and I'll be honest. I was not happy and she said, Get on the exercise bike. She pushed me out of the room instead of let me do my morning work. She made me ride the bike. Now I was of two minds. Part of me wanted to tell her to shut up and stop, and I don't want to do it.

But the other part of me knows I need that pressure. Sometimes it helps to have another person who's really helping you. It helps to have someone supporting you 100%. I hate writing the exercise bike by myself. When I'm out there, it's me, my girlfriend are two kids and the dog. It turns into a bunch of fun and inexperience. Everyone's playing, talking. We play music. My daughter starts dancing next to the bike and having a blast.

All of that, we set up the infrastructure to make it enjoyable. Suddenly riding the bike isn't so bad. I don't hate writing it on my own. I'm actually OK about writing it on my own, but riding with them is so much more fun. I live on an island with a lot of exercise opportunities. I could surf every day, kike every day. The great thing about having exercise bike is that I do it.

I start my day and then later on, if I go out and hit the waves or something else, it really just doubles it and gives the amazing benefits. Having something I could do at home. I don't like to leave the house a lot right now. Have a brand new baby. We've got this new puppy. I like to be close to home, but I do love surfing, kayaking. We're gonna do that more and more.

We're going to a little bit of a transition phase with having two babies in a new dog and all these other things. Having a baseline, Having someone support me who understands my goals is really valuable. She checks my blood pressure every day without a little machine. She writes it down in a little notebook to track things. We tracked my blood pressure one of exercising When I'm not exercising one sitting when I'm working. What up stressed when I'm not stressed.

Most of us don't even know how to take our own blood pressure. Now I know how to do it with this figure monitor and a stethoscope. I used to work as an anti. I was a volunteer empty for a year. When I was in college, I went through that all that training. I went through all that training, so I know how it works. But we got the Elektronik one, and it cost, I think, $20 maybe $30. It allows us to monitor my health all the time.

Many people who have health problems are literal, overweight. We don't even by simple devices that can help us take control of our destiny. We wait until we go to the doctor to get that reading, but your doctor can make mistakes. Your doctor can mess up things. You can buy us any piece of medical equipment on Amazon. Now start taking responsibility for your health, for your medical situation, and amazing things can happen. There are really great opportunities there.

And if you're looking for someone to coach you or someone help you, I'll post a link in the notes for this video to or really great fitness coach. That actually helped me a lot. What I was going through a transition face at my last house. Now my gym said, it's a little bit different, but I think he's really great. I wasn't able to find a good personal trainer on the island where I live right now.

I tried with a bunch of different people, really didn't work out. So I found someone online who provided, was great, coaching great support and really helped me overcome and cross my last plateau. He pushed me from 112 kilos down to 102 kilos. Really help me break through that barrier. If you need help, it's okay to ask for. It's OK to make that decision, but you have to realize your health is in your own hands by cutting down the way.

By taking control of your body, you can extend your life span by 30 or 40 years. I'm responsible for my health. I am responsible for my family. I'm just a TTE the beginning of the big phase of my life and my career. The things I do have changed. Now I have also stopped high risk behaviors. I used to free climb, which sounds insane for a fat guy.

But when I lived in Wales, one of the other countries I've loved living it, I used to do free climbing on cliffs. There were about 152 100 meters straight up and looking back, that's so crazy because one slip and I would die all of these experiences and living on the edge and being an extreme sports guy. Those are things I enjoyed a little bit off before I started having kids. But now I think about in my decision calculus, how it affects the people around me.

My family needs me to support them, and I certainly don't want my kids living off my life insurance when I'm gone in a month and I don't get to see them grow up here. Some people brag about the size of the waves they ride. If people want to write 12 foot, 15 foot, 20 foot rates really serious waves and then people fall and they snap their spine or they break their arm. I don't want to live that close to the edge.

I ride enjoyable waves that I have a blast on. I could do some moves, but it's nothing like competition level stuff. It's nothing where I might crash and break my arm and then not be able to support my family or get knocked underwater and drowned. Just a few days ago, One of my neighbors is always bragging about being a big wave. Surfer told me this story is like there's an amazing search body went to You've got to go sometime.

And then he proceeds to tell me a story about how he almost died there. He got trapped on the reef underwater it only because he can hold his breath for five minutes. Did he survive? He was under the water for more than four minutes before he escaped. That doesn't make me want to serve there. That doesn't make me want to experience that I don't want to live that close to the edge anymore.

If you're younger, you think you can live for ever, really live on the edge and you do all these crazy things. You want to slow down that living on the edge, idea that living on the edge experience when you start having kids, when you start traveling and doing things, you want to find the right balance that fits for your lifestyle that fits for where you are Now. If you're single with no kids, live on the edge as much as you want. That's fine.

If you're older, you're experience. Might be more about what I first talked about. How you need to take control of your health. You need to take control of your physical condition. Need to take more and more control of your prescriptions.

I've been doing a lot of research in the medical field for the past year because I've been working on some projects for clients writing about that and really just doing a lot of research and reading a lot of scientific studies about topics like diabetes, hypertension, hair loss, obesity, problems with your heart, all of those things matter to me because I was fat for a long time. Two years ago I quit smoking. I was coughing blood all the time from my smoking. I smelled like garbage.

I was gross and I looked in the mirror one day and said no more. I got to stop and I had had a cigarette since. If you're in that type of situation where you're addicted to something like cigarettes or drinking that, you know is killing you, it can be very hard to break free. We traditionally quit by looking at it and saying I want to do it, but I'm not allowed to anymore and that's where temptation exists. That's where it's hard.

The way I quit smoking is I replaced the desire with discussed. I think smoking is discussed him. I think it's really gross when someone smokes near me. I think they're disgusting. I changed my core belief because I know that's how I can save my life. I don't have that temptation to smoke because I've changed my belief about I see this gross. I want to stay far away from it. I don't like the smell. I want my kids to be around it.

I don't like any of those things. That was a very hard mind shit shit for me because I used to think smoking was cool and awesome, but I changed from pro smoking guy to totally anti smoking. And in fact, over the two years since I've quit smoking several times that had a dream. I smoked in the dream and I woke up devastated. So upset, almost crying. The strongest nightmares I have now are about smoking because I never want to go back.

I hated the thought of it. The thought of dying young giving up my life. If you're young, you think you're gonna live forever. You can smoke and do all the things you want to do. All that partying, crazy living you want, but it catches up to you. The more you want to travel, the more you want to experience the world. In the further off the beaten path you want to go, the more seriously you have to take your own health.

You can't trust hospitals, doctors, anyone else. Even in America. Ah, large number of people die every single year from mistakes. Hospitals make a lot of steaks. And if you think about it. It's a mathematical inevitability. Millions of people go to the hospital. Millions of procedures are performed, millions of tests or run. Statistically, there's always gonna be a percentage of mistakes. It's impossible to have a no mistake experience when millions and millions and millions of events are happening.

The more you can disconnect yourself from the need for medical care, the better the key steps in the process. Our understanding, the medical situation of the country are going to understanding what type of insurance backup care you need to set up to make sure you're covered, knowing where all the proper medical facilities are near where you live. Do you need to be near hospital? Do you need to be near a doctor? Do you need different types of care all the time?

What exactly do you need with those pieces of information, you could determine where you can live and the options available to you. A little bit of knowledge can go a long way when it comes to taking care of your health, become proactive, take action and realize that medical care in most countries in the world is actually amazing. You confined tier one hospitals better than your local hospital. The charge. 5%. And when you go in for a procedure, you have six nurses in two doctors.

Everyone's giving you their attention, and that feels really, really good. Take control of your medical destiny, and don't let it keep you from going abroad. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode.

We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race hit over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's best seller, Serve No master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to serve no master podcast. Email your questions to podcast at serve.

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