Medical tourist, unhappy but proud
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- Category: Philosofaith
- Written by Aisha Umar
- Hits: 2803
No living and aware Nigerian can say he is not aware of the crisis in our medical sector. If you are one of those blessed with such good health that you hardly have a reason to go to hospital, then you must have read in the news the several times that doctors have gone on strike. They are only second to ASUU in the frequency with which they down tools. This is not to say that their grievances are not recognised or genuine, but simply to say that even without medical tourism, theirs is a profession in pain.
So, it was with great amazement that I read the comments by some medical doctors recently that medical tourism was killing our health sector. One would have expected such esteemed practitioners to know that medical tourism is a result of the failed system in our country, not the cause of it. How many of our countrymen and women have spent a lot of their hard-earned money seeking medical help here, with no luck, but the moment they travel abroad, lo and behold, their illnesses are promptly diagnosed and treated? This is not an attempt to say doctors here don’t know their work, it simply means that sometimes they don’t have the equipment they need to easily diagnose and treat illnesses.In a story on the Health Report page of Daily Trust of January 18th, Dr. Felix Ogedegbe, a consultant with the Cedarcrest Hospital and Dr. Biodun Ogungbo, a surgeon both decried the phenomenon of medical tourism saying that it is killing the medical sector and is demoralising to the medical practitioner. Dr. Ogedegbe added that many risks were involved when Nigerians shop for medical treatment abroad claiming that in most cases they tend to compound their illnesses rather than get cured. I disagree with him. The number of Nigerians seeking medical treatment abroad is only increasing due to the very good and effective treatment they get outside Nigerian shores.
I recall that a few years ago my friend’s two-year-old daughter Aisha, was admitted at the most expensive public hospital in this country when she suffered from a sickle cell crisis. For two weeks the toddler had a consistently high fever that despite her illness, she was permanently kept undressed except for her diaper. This was necessary they said in order to bring her temperature down. At the end of two weeks with no improvement at all in her condition, she was flown to a hospital in Egypt. In exactly five days Aisha and her parents were back in this country. Not only was her temperature down at last, Aisha could now sit and eat. Of course she had lost her ability to walk in the two weeks she was being treated here with no visible result. It took several months of practice before Aisha could walk again.
Recently, at the Cairo-based Arab Contractors medical centre, where I went for a check-up, I ran into a Nigerian who had taken his son for treatment. The young man was a car accident victim whose leg was to have been amputated in Nigeria before wise counsel prevailed on the father to take him to Egypt for a second opinion. As of the time the father and I were chatting, with the son sitting nearby, he had already regained the use of his legs and was learning to use the two to walk. So happy was this father with his son’s progress that he quickly arranged for his mother in law to be brought to Egypt, the moment he was told she had gone into a diabetes induced coma. The decision by the Teaching Hospital in his home state was to have her brain operated on. In Cairo no surgeon’s knife had touched her, but ‘last night she spent some time talking to members of her family in Nigeria’ her son in law told me.
Now, there is no magic in Egypt that’s making these miraculous recoveries possible. All they have is an effective, well-organised medical system that believes in investing in the latest medical equipment. I know this for a fact because three years ago I was a surgical patient at the Al-Hilal Hospital, a government owned medical facility, where I was operated on for slip disk. I had the best medical attention one could ask for. Lots of tests before the final surgery and the neuro-surgeon who did my surgery was one of the best in the Arab world. His young colleagues kept telling me how lucky I was that he was around to operate on me because as they said, he was always on call in Kuwait, Dubai and other such affluent destinations in the middle-east. There was round the clock attention with courteous doctors and nurses checking you up every few hours and hastening to your bed side at the slightest need.
And this is the kind of report you hear from all those who went for medical trips abroad. Efficient and courteous service as well as value for money, that’s what you get when you seek medical help in Dubai, Egypt, India and the more established destinations in Europe. So why should doctors cry wolf in Nigeria when it is the failed system that is forcing us to travel far and wide in search of medical help? Once upon a time it was only the very rich, or top- ranking public officers that could afford to travel abroad for medical help. Today ordinary workers and small business owners also save and save in order to afford foreign medical aid because our medical sector is in shambles. I once met a worker who said she saved part of her salary for months in order to take her mother abroad to treat a persistent back ache that has defied solution here. Today her mother is the proud owner of a painless back.
What is even more amazing about these medical trips is how much less they cost compared to the treatment here. A lot of people had done successful surgeries at about or less than 1000 US dollars abroad, but most such high profile surgeries cost no less than N250,000 here. And while sometimes archaic equipment is used to conduct the treatment here, any of these medical tourist destinations use state- of- the- art equipment. A friend who recently had a major heart surgery in India, had it done without the pains of a surgeon’s knife. While watching the screen on her hospital bed in Bangalore, Maryam watched as a tube was released into her system which went to the exact spot on her blocked artery and expanded into a balloon, thereby immediately dispersing the blockage, without having to open her heart out.
For over a decade, eye cataract sufferers in Maiduguri had crossed the border to Cameroon, to a border town called Falkwata to have their sights restored through laser surgery, which heals quicker than normal surgery, but the skill is yet to be developed here. Sixteen years ago when I was expecting my first daughter, I had an ultrasound scan that showed me the foetus in normal human form at only nine weeks. When having my remaining three children later, the scan always showed a blurred image that had to be interpreted for me by the doctor. I was totally confused and had to ask, during my last pregnancy, why it was possible for me to see my first daughter clearly at nine weeks and all I could see now are blurred images. In amazement the doctor asked me when I saw that first scan, I told him it was in September 1994, in Johannesburg. He shook his head and said that sounded like a 3-D scan, but that 3-D scans were not available in 1994. I told him that they were because I had had one. He then insisted that it must have been on test-run at the time my South African doctor used it on me. The moral of this anecdote is that because we don’t access the latest in medical technology, we don’t achieve much in terms of medical breakthroughs.
So I say to our lamenting doctors, medical tourism is not the cause but a symptom of our dying medical sector. They must get their acts together and put enough pressure on government to do whatever is necessary to revive and upgrade it. All of us medical tourists are not happy that we had to go abroad to seek what we need here. But we are not ashamed to because the system here has failed us, pure and simple.
Articles
Medical tourist, unhappy but proud
Category: Philosofaith Written by Aisha Umar Hits: 2803
No living and aware Nigerian can say he is not aware of the crisis in our medical sector. If you are one of those blessed with such good health that you hardly have a reason to go to hospital, then you must have read in the news the several times that doctors have gone on strike. They are only second to ASUU in the frequency with which they down tools. This is not to say that their grievances are not recognised or genuine, but simply to say that even without medical tourism, theirs is a profession in pain.
So, it was with great amazement that I read the comments by some medical doctors recently that medical tourism was killing our health sector. One would have expected such esteemed practitioners to know that medical tourism is a result of the failed system in our country, not the cause of it. How many of our countrymen and women have spent a lot of their hard-earned money seeking medical help here, with no luck, but the moment they travel abroad, lo and behold, their illnesses are promptly diagnosed and treated? This is not an attempt to say doctors here don’t know their work, it simply means that sometimes they don’t have the equipment they need to easily diagnose and treat illnesses.In a story on the Health Report page of Daily Trust of January 18th, Dr. Felix Ogedegbe, a consultant with the Cedarcrest Hospital and Dr. Biodun Ogungbo, a surgeon both decried the phenomenon of medical tourism saying that it is killing the medical sector and is demoralising to the medical practitioner. Dr. Ogedegbe added that many risks were involved when Nigerians shop for medical treatment abroad claiming that in most cases they tend to compound their illnesses rather than get cured. I disagree with him. The number of Nigerians seeking medical treatment abroad is only increasing due to the very good and effective treatment they get outside Nigerian shores.
I recall that a few years ago my friend’s two-year-old daughter Aisha, was admitted at the most expensive public hospital in this country when she suffered from a sickle cell crisis. For two weeks the toddler had a consistently high fever that despite her illness, she was permanently kept undressed except for her diaper. This was necessary they said in order to bring her temperature down. At the end of two weeks with no improvement at all in her condition, she was flown to a hospital in Egypt. In exactly five days Aisha and her parents were back in this country. Not only was her temperature down at last, Aisha could now sit and eat. Of course she had lost her ability to walk in the two weeks she was being treated here with no visible result. It took several months of practice before Aisha could walk again.
Recently, at the Cairo-based Arab Contractors medical centre, where I went for a check-up, I ran into a Nigerian who had taken his son for treatment. The young man was a car accident victim whose leg was to have been amputated in Nigeria before wise counsel prevailed on the father to take him to Egypt for a second opinion. As of the time the father and I were chatting, with the son sitting nearby, he had already regained the use of his legs and was learning to use the two to walk. So happy was this father with his son’s progress that he quickly arranged for his mother in law to be brought to Egypt, the moment he was told she had gone into a diabetes induced coma. The decision by the Teaching Hospital in his home state was to have her brain operated on. In Cairo no surgeon’s knife had touched her, but ‘last night she spent some time talking to members of her family in Nigeria’ her son in law told me.
Now, there is no magic in Egypt that’s making these miraculous recoveries possible. All they have is an effective, well-organised medical system that believes in investing in the latest medical equipment. I know this for a fact because three years ago I was a surgical patient at the Al-Hilal Hospital, a government owned medical facility, where I was operated on for slip disk. I had the best medical attention one could ask for. Lots of tests before the final surgery and the neuro-surgeon who did my surgery was one of the best in the Arab world. His young colleagues kept telling me how lucky I was that he was around to operate on me because as they said, he was always on call in Kuwait, Dubai and other such affluent destinations in the middle-east. There was round the clock attention with courteous doctors and nurses checking you up every few hours and hastening to your bed side at the slightest need.
And this is the kind of report you hear from all those who went for medical trips abroad. Efficient and courteous service as well as value for money, that’s what you get when you seek medical help in Dubai, Egypt, India and the more established destinations in Europe. So why should doctors cry wolf in Nigeria when it is the failed system that is forcing us to travel far and wide in search of medical help? Once upon a time it was only the very rich, or top- ranking public officers that could afford to travel abroad for medical help. Today ordinary workers and small business owners also save and save in order to afford foreign medical aid because our medical sector is in shambles. I once met a worker who said she saved part of her salary for months in order to take her mother abroad to treat a persistent back ache that has defied solution here. Today her mother is the proud owner of a painless back.
What is even more amazing about these medical trips is how much less they cost compared to the treatment here. A lot of people had done successful surgeries at about or less than 1000 US dollars abroad, but most such high profile surgeries cost no less than N250,000 here. And while sometimes archaic equipment is used to conduct the treatment here, any of these medical tourist destinations use state- of- the- art equipment. A friend who recently had a major heart surgery in India, had it done without the pains of a surgeon’s knife. While watching the screen on her hospital bed in Bangalore, Maryam watched as a tube was released into her system which went to the exact spot on her blocked artery and expanded into a balloon, thereby immediately dispersing the blockage, without having to open her heart out.
For over a decade, eye cataract sufferers in Maiduguri had crossed the border to Cameroon, to a border town called Falkwata to have their sights restored through laser surgery, which heals quicker than normal surgery, but the skill is yet to be developed here. Sixteen years ago when I was expecting my first daughter, I had an ultrasound scan that showed me the foetus in normal human form at only nine weeks. When having my remaining three children later, the scan always showed a blurred image that had to be interpreted for me by the doctor. I was totally confused and had to ask, during my last pregnancy, why it was possible for me to see my first daughter clearly at nine weeks and all I could see now are blurred images. In amazement the doctor asked me when I saw that first scan, I told him it was in September 1994, in Johannesburg. He shook his head and said that sounded like a 3-D scan, but that 3-D scans were not available in 1994. I told him that they were because I had had one. He then insisted that it must have been on test-run at the time my South African doctor used it on me. The moral of this anecdote is that because we don’t access the latest in medical technology, we don’t achieve much in terms of medical breakthroughs.
So I say to our lamenting doctors, medical tourism is not the cause but a symptom of our dying medical sector. They must get their acts together and put enough pressure on government to do whatever is necessary to revive and upgrade it. All of us medical tourists are not happy that we had to go abroad to seek what we need here. But we are not ashamed to because the system here has failed us, pure and simple.