A Heady Mix at Yanhee Hospital Bangkok

Medical Tourism Thailand – Tourism Authority of Thailand with medical travel information on overseas treatment, operations, healthcare providers and much more.

The Yanhee Hospital in Bangkok is an internationally recognised centre of excellence particularly for plastic surgery,indeed its tag line is, “a destination for beauty,”  although it is also a first rate general hospital favoured by Thais and foreigners alike.

My visit, as part of the familiarisation trip on the Thailand Medical Tourism Blog Contest, was late in the day and besides a tour of the facilities was to include a physical check-up, detox and hyperbaric oxygen experience.  Unfortunately because we were running behind schedule I eventually settled for a comprehensive tour of the hospital and its facilities under the attentive eye of a charming Thai nursing manager, who incidentally stayed behind after work in her own time to show me round, such are the Thai people and their treatment of guests.

Meanwhile, my travelling companion, Victoria, decided to indulge herself with a detox, but somehow the thought of a colonic irrigation just didn’t appeal to me after the hearty lunch I had consumed earlier.

So I left the toxins in place and headed off to visit the various departments of the hospital. There are 36 treatment centres around the hospital that deal with 2000 outpatients each day, these are manned by 130 full time doctors and 125 part time specialists supported by over 1500 staff.  Given the huge range of departments at the hospital it would be impossible to do them all justice in this article, however I would like to mention a couple that I found very interesting.

The first of these was the hyperbaric oxygen treatment area. The hospital has several chambers, which look just like the those you might find on a large dive industry vessel(but slightly smaller). Indeed the primary use of such therapy was until fairly recently aimed at helping divers recover from the bends(decompression sickness).  However the Yanhee Hospital also uses the chambers and treatment to help people with Autism since research has indicated that it can be beneficial for suffers. Indeed the use of hyperbaric oxygen at the hospital is not just limited to Autism since  is also thought to benefit such things as wound healing and the treatment of certain abscesses.

As someone who has snored all my life(well that’s what others tell me) I was also fascinated by the area set aside  for the study and treatment of snoring and Sleep Apnea or sleep apnoea.  As the brochure says, “snoring can be a nightmare-a threat to your health and a hitch to a happy life.”  The middle part, a threat to your life, grabbed my attention. Since it seems that sleep apnoea can indeed be life threatening and associated causes can include high blood pressure!

The Yanhee has a specialist sleep laboratory that runs various test programmes to help diagnose the reasons for sleep apnoea in an individual and offers  several different treatments including but not limited to, continuous positive air pressure (CPAP), where a patient wears an oxygen mask whilst sleeping and breathes increased oxygenated air.

read more here........