Top Tips for Traveling Abroad for Affordable Medical Care

All opinions are mine and mine alone.

In Good Health: Top Tips for Traveling Abroad for Affordable Medical Care

Medical tourism is the act of taking a trip, outside your country of residence, for the specific purpose of getting some form of medical care. The reason it is referred to as tourism is because travelers typically combine their medical care with a vacation in the region and participate in tourist activities while they are there. Medical tourism is on the rise, especially in the Latin American countries.

Benefits of Medical Tourism

Seeking healthcare abroad often has a number of benefits including:

* Cost: If you choose medical tourism to get your treatment it is often much cheaper than having it at home, which means a major surgery can actually be affordable. It is also sometimes covered by medical insurance because some insurance companies are encouraging their customers to look for less expensive medical solutions abroad. It can also be a viable option if you have no or only partial insurance coverage.

* Type of medical care: You can find medical treatments overseas for just about anything you require, such as cosmetic surgery, gastric banding, hip replacement, ankle repair, knee replacement, disc replacement, coronary bypass, mastectomy, cataract surgery, vasectomy, colectomy and dental surgery. Visit this site to find out more about dental tourism in Costa Rica

* Customer service: According to patient experience, overseas healthcare facilities place a greater importance on customer service than many U.S. healthcare facilities. This is possibly to compensate for the number of possible obstacles related to choosing healthcare abroad.

* High-Quality Healthcare: Many of the physicians, surgeons, and nurses that provide these overseas healthcare services have been trained in Great Britain and the United States. Medical facilities all over the world have acquired accreditation from reputable international organizations such as the JCI and JCAHO.

* Immediate Treatment: This can be a very important factor if you are traveling from a country which has a public health service, particularly if there is a waiting list in your country for the type of surgery you require.

* Improved recovery: If you’re on vacation, you’re going to be feeling better, sooner. Who would heal faster if they were recovering from surgery on a beach? Not only dies it diminish the stress of recovery, but it also gives you something to look forward to afterward.

* Travel Opportunity: Although you are traveling overseas for the purpose of medical treatment, you do have the opportunity to visit a country that you might never have been to before and may not have visited under other circumstances, so you can also enjoy this part of the experience.

If you are considering traveling outside the U.S. for medical treatment, do your research carefully. Find out which countries specialize in which types of procedure. If you can, talk to other people who have sought the same treatment overseas and find out what their experience was like. Talk to your healthcare insurance company and see if they are prepared to cover any or all of the procedure.