Why does Chavez leave Venezuela for cancer treatment? Is his country devoid of modern hospitals and oncologist?
Why send the rape victim from India to Singapore for treatment? Is India lacking in up to date medical care? I would not have thought so.
These are making headlines of course and may have a political reason behind them. Do many people have to leave the country for good medical care or is it that these cases are isolated?
Are people in India and Venezuela suffering from poor health care and people in Cuba and Singapore are not?
I need a world view from you that I lack. Thanks
Because he can afford better care than exists in his homeland.
The Indian rape survivor (who has since died) was sent to that hospital because of its expertise in transplants.
I remember reading somewhere that many Americans who live in the US Virgin Islands travel to Puerto Rico for health care, but that doesn’t really involve leaving the country. It’s more that the US Virgin Islands are a pretty small jurisdiction and you might expect that the big hospitals with lots of money and lots of expensive equipment would prefer to locate in areas with a lot of people, in a similar way to why there are more major hospitals in Chicago than there are in rural central Illinois.
You don’t even need a world view to understand this. Even people in the US, Canada, the UK, etc. will travel to other cities or states where there may be specialists not available in their hometowns.
In some cases, the best possible surgeons may not be in the US, or certain procedures that may be common elsewhere are not allowed by the FDA here.
For example, multi-level spinal disk replacement is not being done in the US as the FDA still considers it “experimental” so people who need such a procedure have to go elsewhere, most likely to Spain or Brazil to see doctors who have been doing these for a decade or more.
yes, I know that in my state there is only one hospital that does heart transplants. But it seems odd that Cuba is better at cancer treatment than Venezuela. Is that country so poor in medical care? And India exports plenty of doctors. Does anyone know more about medical care in India?
I have traveled from the US to the Czech Republic for medical care… no insurance in the US, but valid insurance everywhere else.
FYI, this article in the Times of India says, “The decision to flow out the victim out of the country was taken during a cabinet meeting which was chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.” Normally, one’s care is not decided in cabinet meetings chaired by the prime minister, so this may not have been a decision made entirely by doctors. Also, the hospital is described as one specializing in the transplant of multiple organs, and I believe they were talking about an intestinal transplant for her. (Her injuries were quite severe and gruesome.)
Personal Experience
circa Sept 1997
NZ (Wellington) wanted to send my wife to AUS for treatment of her AVM brain bleed.
We chose to return to the US per advice from a Neurologist friend.
It was a matter of technology, she needed Gamma Knife treatment and it was new tech at the time. NZ did not have one. AUS did. A hospital in Los Angeles did, so that is where we wound up.
Cuban doctors are reputed to be superb, although their specialty is “doing miracles with no resources” (which I assume not to be the case where kahunas are involved). Venezuelan doctors? Dunnow.
Cuba actually supplies Venezuela with doctors (in return for various subsidies).
Going out of country might also allow Chavez better information control over his condition, with less risk of leaks to opposition media.
Our small government run hospital in Cayman just is not capable of providing care for certain conditions. For example there is no cardiac surgeon nor equipment for a cardiac catheterization lab. Only in the last few years has the country got an MRI machine. A cardiologist visits the island monthly for routine follow up care as do certain other specialists.
As a result air ambulances routinely transport the most critically ill to Miami. Usually even the critical patients need to be somewhat stable for transport. Some patients are instead transported to Honduras, Jamaica, or Cuba depending in part on the visa status of the patient. (The US will not allow a non-citizen critically ill unconscious patient with medical insurance into the country unless they have a visa.)
A friend was a nurse at the government hospital and was assigned to fly along on an air ambulance as the patient was in particularly bad shape. They had to divert to Havana as the patient started to deteriorate markedly and might not have last the remaining 40 minutes to Miami. The patient was passed out of the plane to the Cuban medical crew who would not even let the flight crew out of the plane.
An Indian cardiac surgeon, Doctor Devi Shetty, has just started to build a tertiary care hospital in Cayman with a business plan to focus on medical tourism. Much of the Caribbean is underserved and he assumes he will also pull patients from the US, Canada, and Latin America.