Mexico Assisted Living Provides Assisted Living Services in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Posted on August 19, 2014 | Comments Off on Mexico Assisted Living Provides Assisted Living Services in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Puerto Vallarta, Mexico  :

Mexico Assisted Living provides a new opportunity for senior people, who live in America and Canada to spend assisted living vacation in the appealing beach resort, Puerto Vallarta in Mexico. They will be able to combine pleasure with beneficial activities to improve their health at very low costs.

More and more people from Canada and America choose Puerto Vallarta as a Mexican top destination for assisted living vacation or retirement due to a variety of reasons. This place is recognized as especially appealing dental and medical tourism destination because of the professional doctors and dentists and affordable medical procedures that cost about a tenth part of what they would have to pay for the same treatment in their own countries.

This explains the fact that people prefer to live in Mexico after their retirement, when they will no longer worry about the expenses they will pay for caregivers and doctors. Mexico Assisted Living Company offers people a room with all the needed amenities in it and appropriate care for just $3000 per month. The rooms feature an ocean panorama and provide patients with the opportunity to combine natural and medical treatment, taking advantage of sun and various water activities.

The customers can choose between various low cost procedures offered at Mexico Assisted Living. A massage that continues for an hour costs less than $20, while having a lunch in a great restaurant, located on the very beach, will cost people between 10 and 20 dollars.

Mexico Assisted Living Company offers 24 hour care, nurses and a doctor, who live on site and are always available to help, two swimming pools, air conditioning, direct access to the beach, and much more. Patients are able to enjoy TV with more than 60 channels and Internet in their rooms and use their medical alert necklaces at any time to signalize for emergency, resting assured that the caregivers will immediately respond. There are wheelchairs available in the whole community and the activity director schedules daily activities for people.

Adults may meet in the large common areas to share their stories and make new friends, or just to interact with other patients and to not feel alone. The company offers also transportation to different medical or dental appointments. Three meals per day are included and the customers can visit Tiki Bar.

The company offers several services to meet the needs of tourists. These are vacation stay, senior vacations, where senior people can choose to stay for a period of a few days to a month or so, and assisted living with high quality care and low prices, with all inclusive and where doctors and nurses are reachable 24 hours a day.

All, who are interested in this opportunity, can visit http://www.mexicoassistedliving.com for more information.

source: http://www.digitaljournal.com / Digital Journal / Home> Press Release /Puerto Vallarta, Mexico / ReleaseWire / August 15th, 2014

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Fertility tourism and the new human trafficking

Posted on August 17, 2014 | Comments Off on Fertility tourism and the new human trafficking

Fertility tourism is a growing global industry, bringing in over $400 million a year in India alone. For the right price, people can buy IVF treatments, donated eggs and sperm along with a surrogate mother. The clients are often white and rich. The suppliers pressed into service are often neither.

In Margaret Attwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, a class of women exist solely to give birth to other’s children. Their bodies are no longer their own, but a commodity in perpetual servitude to richer, ruling classes.

This fantasy is more real than imagined when you consider the case of Gammy, born with Down Syndrome, separated from his twin and left to live in poverty with his surrogate mother, Pattharamon Janbua, in Thailand. Janbua has become the 21st Century Handmaid, the face of impoverished fertility offered at a price to the rich and most often white customers.

Gammy and Janbua’s case highlights the inequality of fertility tourism for what it is: the new face of human trafficking.

As always, the most powerful people will always be those with the most money but the question must be asked: what are they buying and is it ethical? By using money and vulnerability as a means to coerce women into exploitative service, fertility tourism is an abuse of power that reduces the trafficked from people into produce.

Based on the UN’s definition of human trafficking, fertility tourism often results in human trafficking by recruiting people by through coercion, twisting power and vulnerability and giving payments that result in physical exploitation.

According to Janbua, already a mother, the surrogacy fees promised were 350,000 baht (A$11,669) which far exceeded the 20,000 baht (A$666) she and her husband struggled to live off every month. Janbua entered into the agreement by the force of poverty, telling reporters “my husband agreed because we didn’t have money to pay our debt”. She also claims she has not been fully paid.

She’s not alone.

As an industry that relies on the labour of women, it doesn’t always treat them well. In India, women’s groups are campaigning against deceptive agents pressing young women into service and signing contracts they can’t read. Many surrogate mothers are separated from their families to live in quarantined hostels with other women while others go into seclusion fearing social shame. There are cases of women dying during childbirth. This is the reality hidden from the pristine white clinics and smiling hosts promoted on websites.

Baby1CT17aug2014

On surrogacy forums, where questions about personal experience are continually punctuated by offers of assistance by surrogacy agents eager to broker a new deal, people talk about God’s will helping them have a baby instead of their wallets. Surrogate mothers become nameless broodmares spoken of as objects and not individuals, reduced to a sum of parts from their womb to their donated eggs. One woman advises people to inspect the surrogate mothers because if they’re from the Ukraine they’ll be contaminated by Chernobyl and that “if you see the [Indian] surrogate mother consider yourself lucky. Maybe better not to see.”

The implications of it “better not to see” a surrogate mother or to reduce them to produce potentially spoiled by nuclear accident speaks volumes of how easily people can disregard others when money is involved.

The popularity of fertility tourism shows that the world can still devise unique ways to literally sell a woman’s body to the highest bidder. As with all forms of human trafficking, we must find a way to look past our mania for cheap labour and look to the real cost of what we are buying.

This is no way to start a life and it’s no way to respect the lives of others.

Source: SBS Australia
source: http://www.eturbonews.com / eTN Global Travel Industry News / by Amy Gray / August 05th, 2014

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Posted in Fertility Tourism, Reports,Features, Statistics

The tooth about dental tourism

Posted on August 16, 2014 | Comments Off on The tooth about dental tourism

As my auto rickshaw wound through the smoggy streets of New Delhi I leaned my head out the side door and spat a mouthful of blood into the gutter.

Two wisdom teeth had just been pulled from my gums and I was feeling surprisingly good.

It was 2009 and I was half way through a six-month India adventure.

A sharp pain at the back of my jaw had been getting progressively worse so I decided to see a dentist while passing through New Delhi.

With no idea where to go I phoned up the New Zealand Embassy in India and was recommended Dr Ghandi’s clinic on a street called Mahatma Gandhi Marg.

With a name like that I felt in safe hands.

X-rays showed two wisdom teeth needed extracting and the next day I was back in the chair getting local anesthetic injected into my gums.

Thirty minutes later I walked out the door with a bag of painkillers and my two wisdom teeth in an envelope. The whole procedure cost about $200.

A few years later I had the remaining two wisdom teeth removed while travelling through Cambodia for an even cheaper sum of $50 each.

Medical tourism or health tourism is an increasingly popular option for people wanting to take a holiday and get medical treatment at the same time, all the while saving sometimes considerable sums of money.

Dental holidays would have to be the most common form of medical tourism with destinations such as Thailand and the Philippines proving popular with Kiwis.

The clinics I went to in India and Cambodia were professional, hygienic and affordable.

But needless to say there are numerous risks associated with undergoing medical treatment in a foreign land.

The internet is full of medical tourism information and first hand accounts of people’s experiences.

Some stories recall seamless, cost effective operations and others, nightmare scenarios. Each person will have differing opinions about the safety of medical tourism so carry out your due diligence and weigh up the associated risks.

The New Zealand Dental Association takes a rather pessimistic view towards dental tourism.

New Zealand dentists are increasingly being asked to “pick up the pieces” after overseas dental treatment goes wrong, it says. An advisory on its website outlines the dangers associated with getting dental work done overseas. And the list is long.

Some considerations include:

Can you verify your overseas dentist’s qualifications?

Are you happy meeting your dentist only briefly before treatment?

Is the procedure right for you?

Are the dental materials and equipment the best available?

Who will manage any necessary follow-up care?

Is price your only concern?

Can you be confident that you will not be exposed to the Hepatitis or HIV viruses?

Flying after surgery increases the risk of complications.

Dentistry is both invasive and irreversible.

Now, I may be a bit of a sceptic but I think the association has a vested interest in keeping as much dental business in New Zealand as possible.

Mull the warnings over, do thorough research and draw your own conclusions. Personally, I would do it all over again given the chance.

– Sunday Star Times

source: http://www.stuff.co.nz / Travel / by Joseph Anthony / August 10th, 2014

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Posted in Dental Tourism, Reports,Features, Statistics

New Initiative for Medical Tourism Unveiled

Posted on August 15, 2014 | Comments Off on New Initiative for Medical Tourism Unveiled

Pharmacy chemist woman in drugstore

Most destinations that position themselves as medical tourism centers have world-class health-care facilities that Southern Nevada would never be able to match.

But that hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm of a group of organizations that sees economic opportunity for the region if it capitalizes on its medical tourism assets instead of lamenting its weaknesses.

Instead of recruiting medical specialists from places that those experts aren’t likely to leave, local leaders instead will focus on local attributes and redefine their mission.

The Las Vegas Regional Strategic Plan for Medical and Wellness Tourism was unveiled Wednesday evening at a meeting of health care and tourism professionals, organizations and nonprofit groups. The event was sponsored by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance, Las Vegas Health, Education, Advocacy and Leadership in Southern Nevada and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Medical tourism is considered a lucrative economic engine, estimated to generate $50 billion to $60 billion a year. Recent reports indicate that the industry will grow to $100 billion a year in the next decade and that the combination of medical and wellness tourism could eclipse $500 billion annually.

A handful of Southern Nevada medical specialists have built practices around serving wealthy clients that jet into Las Vegas from anywhere in the world to receive treatment.

“This is about taking what our community already does well and collaborating to forge new and unexpected economic opportunities in medical and wellness tourism,” said Tom Skancke, president and CEO of the Global Economic Alliance, an economic development advocate.

So instead of wooing the world’s best medical specialists, Southern Nevada should market its medical training infrastructure, its menu of wellness offerings — including more than 45 world-class resort spas — and its team of service industry professionals that can steer prospective clients to medical specialists few people know are based in Las Vegas.

Wednesday’s announcement, attended by 100 people in the medical and tourism industries, was made at the 5-year-old Oquendo Surgical Training Center, a facility with surgical stations and telecommunications systems that enable groups to view and learn medical procedures.

A summary of the plan was presented by its co-authors, Douglas Geinzer, CEO of Las Vegas HEALS; Stowe Shoemaker, dean of UNLV’s College of Hotel Administration; Michael Vannozzi, director of public policy for Global Economic Alliance; and Cheryl Smith, medical and wellness tourism manager for the Convention and Visitors Authority.

Thousands of people travel to Las Vegas for medical conferences at which they learn about new procedures that can be demonstrated for large groups.

The report notes that wellness and prevention are key components to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and Southern Nevada’s spa industry is well-suited to serve the wellness tourism market.

“I think there is an assumption that wellness is only defined by things like cholesterol check-ups and executive physicals,” said Smith, co-author of the report.

“That’s the medical aspect of it. But there’s a proactive side, prevention,” she said. “Our spas contribute to overall health and well-being, stress reduction and destination for visitors to experience wellness differently then perhaps they can at home.”

The Affordable Care Act has placed a heavy emphasis on electronic medical records, and Southern Nevada’s high concentration of ultra-secure cloud and data storage facilities has attracted new firms and talent to the region.

The plan also envisions wellness travel agents and medical concierges that can identify resources and introduce Las Vegas’ list of client offerings.

Las Vegas has niche disciplines within the health-care industry — such as fertility, plastic surgery, age management, bariatric and orthopedic surgery, diagnostic imaging and dental — which attract both domestic and international travelers to Southern Nevada.

Organizers also hope to position Southern Nevada as a location for clinical trials. The Governor’s Office of Economic Development awarded a Knowledge Fund grant to UNLV to start a Quantitative Clinical Trials Center at the university.

Experts say that if private and academic partners can build capacity for clinical trials, it should drive additional visitation to the area by patients seeking innovative experimental treatments.

The report issued Wednesday was developed by the founding partners after meetings that began more than a year ago with 147 businesses and organizations.

“Although we have made significant progress over the past 10 years,” the report said, “the medical and wellness tourism market in Las Vegas has yet to take off. Our region needs a more robust strategy to capture a healthy slice of the medical and wellness tourism market and after more than a year of meetings and outreach, the project partners have developed a strategy that begins to address the systemic issues that are holding our medical and wellness tourism economy from realizing its full potential.”

lvrj.com

source: http://www.capstonebrokerage.com / Capstone Brokerage / Home> News Articles / by Richard N. Velotta (Las Vegas Review Journal) August 2014 / August 07th, 2014

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Posted in Healthcare/Medical Insurance/ Loans, Medical Tourism/Health Tourism, Travelling For Surgery Abroad / Medical Surgery Overseas, Uncategorized

Baby on board: Irish ‘fertility tourists’ look for help abroad

Posted on August 13, 2014 | Comments Off on Baby on board: Irish ‘fertility tourists’ look for help abroad
Nicole Kidman and her children

Nicole Kidman and her children

Hundreds of Irish couples who desperately want to start a family are going to Spain, Denmark and the Czech 
Republic in a new wave of fertility tourism.

They are shunning Irish clinics in favour of seeking fertility treatments abroad to start a family. And they have been joined by same-sex couples as well as single women who want to conceive before it is too late.

Enquiries for overseas fertility treatments have increased by 59pc in the past six months alone, according to new research by the private healthcare search engine, WhatClinic.com.

The numbers of Irish people enquiring about IVF procedures in the Czech Republic has increased by a whopping 465pc in the last 12 months, with requests for information about the same treatment in Spain more than doubling during this period.

Denmark and the Czech Republic are popular not just in terms of advanced treatments but also because donors are likely to be close enough to our Celtic colouring, which is considered important in areas such as egg and sperm donation.

Meanwhile in Ireland, IVF enquires have dropped by more than a fifth this year. As well as Denmark, Spain, and the Czech Republic, the United States is also a destination of choice.

Fertility treatments such as IVF have become increasingly popular in recent years, with a number of well-known mums like Brooke Shields , Christie Brinkley  and Nicole Kidman  all speaking openly about how it helped them to conceive.

One round of IVF in Ireland costs on average €4,662. However, in the Czech Republic, patients are paying €2,651. And with many couples needing several attempts at IVF before it is successful, the cost of the treatment can become a major factor.

While the average cost of IVF in Spain is higher than in Ireland, at an average of €4,800, it is believed that Spain’s reputation as a leader in this highly specialised medical area has made it an attractive destination for Irish fertility patients.

However, Dr John Waterstone, Medical Director of the Cork Fertility Clinic, believes that while a small number of Irish people may be travelling for IVF, the biggest draw are overseas egg banks, which are not available here.

“There are a smaller number travelling for IVF treatment because there is the perception that it is cheaper abroad,” he explained.

“The Czech Republic is a big destination for that, but by the time you factor in travelling and staying somewhere, then it may be that it’s not actually that much cheaper at all. The big reason why women from Ireland are going abroad for fertility treatment is for egg donation, where their eggs are not of a good enough quality to conceive.

“Egg donation is one thing that we can’t do adequately in Ireland at the moment because we don’t have a supply of anonymous egg donors,” 
Dr Waterstone added.

“So we have a link with a clinic in Spain, where our patients go. Some of our patients will also go to the United States because the success rate is extremely high for egg donation there. We are linked with a clinic in the States where they will actually guarantee you a baby or your money back.”

WhatClinic.com says Irish enquiries for egg donation in the Czech Republic have tripled in the last year, with enquiries for the same services in Spain rising by a third.

“The internet has made IVF treatment abroad more accessible and more appealing,” said Declan Keane , Director, Senior Clinical Embryologist with ReproMed Ireland.

“What’s making them go abroad mainly is to access services, which they could not avail of in Ireland up to quite recently, such as donor sperm. So they were travelling abroad to access the sperm banks, but that is all accessible in Ireland now through ReproMed and clinics like us,” Mr Keane said.

“There are no egg banks in Ireland, but certainly we can assist those services through Spain,” Mr Keane added.

“I feel that you are better off staying in Ireland for IVF services and then for donor eggs, we can now freeze the man’s sperm, fly it out, create the embryos and you can even have your embryos brought back into Ireland.”

Mr Keane disagrees with a perception that Irish people are travelling overseas because they feel these clinics have more experience and expertise than fertility clinics in Ireland.

“It’s not that they see the services as being better outside, I think people see it as being cheaper or they are accessing a service they cannot get here,” he explained.

“I think the services in Ireland are excellent.”

However, Mr Keane did concede that there are treatments available elsewhere, including IVF-related procedures, which have not 
yet been introduced in Ireland.

“People will go across the borders to access IVF treatment, where some of the newer techniques haven’t yet hit Ireland,” he said.

“In Ireland we kind of watch what happens; are they successful? Are they viable? Is there any increased risk of abnormalities in the babies? Then we’ll take on those research services. And some people will say ‘look, I just need to access those now, so I’m going.'”

According to one 33-year-old woman, who had two failed IVF procedures in Ireland before going to Spain, where the procedure was finally a success, Irish people are travelling for more than financial reasons and egg donation.

“The main reason for going abroad was to avail of the expertise that clinics with higher patient turnovers have to offer,” she explained.

“Because there are lower numbers doing IVF here, you get the sense that the expertise and the most up-to-date treatment options might not be available.

“I know a few girls my age, who like me, went abroad after two failed cycles. All of us conceived abroad using our own eggs.”

Another woman (37), who is 20 weeks pregnant after travelling to Prague for her third IVF treatment, is more critical of Ireland’s fertility sector.

“It was for male fertility that we went. I always felt that my husband needed a procedure done and they wouldn’t listen to me here, so I asked them in Prague to do it. That operation is the only reason I’m pregnant,” she said.

Sunday Independent

source: http://www.independent.ie / Sunday Independent / Home> Health / by Joanna Kiernan / August 03rd, 2014

 

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