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Summary
On episode 417 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Janet Bristeir, a registered nurse who specializes in safety related to medical tourism. They discuss her book, Medical Tourism: Surgery for Sale, How to Have Surgery Abroad Without It Costing You Your Life.
Janet explains that medical tourism means traveling internationally to buy surgery, usually to beat long wait times or high costs at home. It sounds simple, but the decision touches insurance, follow-up care, travel risk, and who you bring with you, far more than most people expect going in.
The conversation covers how to vet a facility and surgeon, why standard travel insurance won’t cover you, how to plan a recovery before you leave, and why this trip should never be treated like a vacation.
Links
- https://www.areusafe.ca
Key Takeaways
- Medical tourism means traveling internationally to buy surgery, usually to beat wait times or costs. Long public health-system wait times, Bristeir cites 2018 Canadian data of four weeks for a CT scan, ten weeks for an MRI, and 30 percent of hip, knee, or cataract patients missing recommended targets, push patients to look abroad, where care can be faster and dramatically cheaper.
- Most information about medical tourism you’ll find is either pure marketing or a scary headline. Websites promoting facilities often don’t disclose real risks around the surgery or the travel itself, so patients need to seek out balanced, informed sources before committing.
- Line up your follow-up care before you leave, not after you get home. Your home doctor usually won’t want to manage recovery for a procedure they didn’t perform, so you need a plan with a specialist, physiotherapist, or counselor already arranged, especially for something as significant as bariatric surgery.
- Vet the facility and surgeon the same way you’d vet any major purchase. Confirm the surgeon and staff are properly licensed where they practice, ask whether the specific procedure is one they perform regularly, look for accreditation from a body like Joint Commission International, and try to get a call with the surgeon before you commit.
- Travel itself carries risk that can compound before or after surgery. Long flights raise the risk of deep vein thrombosis, more dangerous if you already have joint or circulation issues, and some procedures, like gastric surgery, require a waiting period before flying home so trapped surgical gas can fully disperse.
- Choosing the right travel companion matters as much as choosing the surgeon. The person who joins you needs to function well in a medical setting, be comfortable hearing personal medical details, and be able to speak up for you if you can’t, which isn’t necessarily your usual travel buddy.
- Standard travel insurance will not cover a medical tourism trip. Bristeir spent years searching for insurers that would cover surgery abroad and complications afterward; specialized coverage that pays for return flights and extended care months later is a different, and still hard to find, product.
- A reputable medical tourism facilitator should have no financial stake in where you go. The best facilitators aren’t tied to a single hospital or paid on commission by one facility, so they can recommend the best fit for your case rather than the option that pays them the most.
- Janet Bristeir’s three strategies to get and stay well: be easy on yourself and make small, gradual lifestyle and eating changes rather than drastic ones; work toward your health goal a little every day, like adding a bit more walking distance or a few more stairs at a time; and build in daily mindfulness or quiet time away from devices, along with enough sleep.
“Most information people see about medical tourism is the headline. A person comes back from surgery abroad and dies of something.”
Janet Bristeir
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