Best City in Colombia For Surgery [MEDICAL TOURISM]
![Best City in Colombia For Surgery [MEDICAL TOURISM] Best City in Colombia For Surgery [MEDICAL TOURISM]](/pic/best_city_in_colombia_for_surgery_medical_tourism_/TzZTcEl6TkZSeFU_.jpeg)
all right guys for those of you that follow our journey as we travel around the world in a van welcome back this is a new video we think there may be a few new people that pop into this one because we are talking about medical tourism getting a major surgery done in a foreign country as opposed to doing it in the united states colombia yes so if you follow the journey you know based on four different doctor visits we've had in the past seven months i need full knee replacement on my right knee for the past seven months we have been preparing for this surgery going on a major weight loss journey where i've lost close to 60 pounds which was good and i've had a lot of you ask well did that ease the pain and can that stop the surgery it did not it has helped my left knee a little bit with pain but the right knee is still it is shot it needs full knee replacement and that's what's going to happen so we also get asked why aren't we going back home to the united states to get this done we live in columbia right now yeah we live on the road we live in a van traveling the world we do not have a home in the united states when we decided to do this crazy 10 to 12 year journey around the world in a van we knew we would encounter all kinds of life problems and that we would just stop where we were and address them and that's what we're doing right now colombia is home columbia is where the surgery will take place a few little facts to let some of you that know us pretty well now feel a little bit more at ease i have already done physical therapy i have already done cortisone shots i have already done gel injections and the cartilage is too far gone for any kind of therapy to try to help it grow back so those are not options for my knee now another thing to put all you guys at ease and to answer some questions for anybody that might be thinking about maybe i need to go to columbia to get some surgery the who who world health organization uh their ratings columbia's health care system as a whole is ranked 22nd in the world that's pretty good guys and to give you a comparison that same chart ranks the united states 37th in the world columbia has a very modern very good health care system and nine of the hospitals in colombia are in the top 20 latin american hospitals the hospital we're going to is the second best hospital in columbia our doctors are legit doctors with tons of experience and we have researched the heck out of them so i hope that answers all of those questions now we got to get back to what this video is about where are we going to get this done it was a tough decision guys um the doctor being the most important all the way down to where can we live because there's a lot of rehab that goes with this so we came up with a scale we rated a bunch of different categories at a one to ten and we just added up the numbers and we let the numbers pick where we were going to go so what we're going to do in this video is we're going to take you through those categories and tell you which city went out medellin or cali and at the end you're gonna know where we're gonna be living for the next two and a half to three months we're about to get into the meat of this guys but i wanted to let you know that kurt has been incredibly supportive and this has 100 percent been my decision this is a big thing that i need to deal with so you're going to hear me talk about these categories quite a bit and then kurt will chime in with his thoughts but he was very supportive in letting me make this decision so thank you it's a big deal you're welcome i view my role really in this is uh just to make sure that we're considering or snow is considering all the things this is a big life decision for us she's already kind of gone through some of the things that we've decisions we did made to have it here in colombia and i just wanted to make sure that we were considering all the things that she could feel good knowing that we made the best decisions in the end yeah so the first and most important category was the doctor the actual doctor that's going to do the surgery so uh this was a tie guys we liked both doctors for different reasons the doctor in medellin i found through a medical tourism website made an appointment through a liaison and then met with him for the first time at our consultation he put on a very good presentation he answered all of our questions he was patient with us and he stuck to his guns on me having to meet the weight loss goal for a safe bmi body fat index he was very very strict on that now the doctor in nicaragua i mean the doctor in cali was recommended to us by a doctor i liked a ton last spring back in nicaragua and i have emailed with this guy several times directly with the doctor and i thought going into this that that would for sure be the doctor i liked the most and i did i loved this doctor we had a very good compatible personality he was very kind but in all honesty he was a little bit more lackadaisical well when snow got out of the visit she definitely really warmed the guys and we just kind of went uh warm to the doctor in cali and we kind of went back to some of the key important things and to be honest with you the doctor in medellin had answered a lot of questions actually pulled out the hardware that was going to go in snow's knee when we asked for alternatives he showed us some alternatives i thought the doctor in medellin was a little more thorough and a little kind of born by the book yeah but i think snow had a little early bias based on the recommendation for them needless to say i thought both doctor doctors were good for different reasons and i don't think we could have made it wrong she could have made a wrong choice as it relates to that so the doctor it's a tie all right the next category on the list is the hospital itself where the the surgery and and stuff is going to take place so in all honesty when we first went to the medellin hospital and we were in the waiting area in the consultation area the hospital feels a little dated the windows were open and that bothered her i didn't even notice but to me a hospital should be closed and air conditioned but then i had to take a step back and realize i was just in a waiting area a consultation area it isn't where the surgeries take place and then on the cali side it was a very modern very hospitally feeling hospital not as modern as that facility in nicaragua but it was still pretty nice yeah it was very nice but it was very congested it was very congested and busy couldn't find parking around taxis were crazy it's chaos yeah and the reality is we're gonna have to visit uh that hospital several times uh for the surgery so then then we got the good news that in medellin that hospital that was feeling a little bit dated to me and was giving me a little bit of worry not a lot because it's raided a great hospital but a few years ago they opened a sister hospital just outside of town that is incredibly modern and it's when you look at the rankings it's all tied into one hospital they do transplants there major heart surgery it is a legit modern hospital so when i found out that it would have been kind of been closer to a tie but that gave this one to medellin they're both internationally very well known hospitals and uh so again something she couldn't go wrong next category physical therapy all right full knee replacement comes with two to three months of full on rehabilitation major physical therapy if you want it to turn out right we will be renting an apartment i cannot live in the van while i'm recovering from this so what we wanted to do is our plan was do the first week or so with the hospital facility so you can do the x-rays make sure everything's taken right and then have a physical therapist come to our apartment and have private physical therapy in cali the doctor's like oh sure we could probably make that happen and i think we probably could have but there was nothing concrete we weren't able to find someone to go ahead and talk to about it and in medellin at first they said no they said we don't have people that do that so i did some research so i found a physical therapist in medellin that will come to your apartment and do private therapy and he will go to your first few visits with you at the hospital so there's a smooth transition and it's incredibly affordable so that gives physical therapy to medellin yeah when you think about logistics about going into the hospital getting out of in and out of cabs or whatever kind of public transportation that was and that's been that was a big concern of mine and so having it having somebody a physical therapist who can actually come to the apartment i think is a huge huge plus yeah yeah all right the next one the price uh one thing i didn't address at the beginning of this is if i was to do this in the united states even with decent health insurance at my age there is a high chance that insurance would deny it and we would be paying out right for it and you're looking at 45 to 50 000 as a reasonable cost for that back in the united states so hold on to your hats because this is going to freak y'all out a little bit because even though we have insurance here international insurance and we don't know if it's going to cover it or not we won't know until afterwards when we submit the claim but medellin comes in at the surgery in the hospital about forty five hundred dollars yes four thousand five hundred dollars for surgery doctors anesthesia lab work two nights in the hospital everything including the physical therapy right now physical therapy because we're hiring the private guy okay the physical therapy would be around six hundred dollars and pre-op stuff we don't have a quote for that but i'm just thinking that's going to be around 250 dollars so what do we got 52 5300 medellin cali a little bit more pricey i'm not sure why i don't know if the hospital costs or more or how that works but for the surgery the hospital anesthesia and all of that comes in around six thousand dollars we do not have a price for physical therapy we're unable to get a commitment on that and i put in the same two hundred and fifty dollars so fifty two to fifty three hundred dollars in medellin sixty two to sixty three hundred dollars in cali medellin wins this one because it's cheaper i think you're starting to see a trend but we have more categories the next one is these hospitals down here in colombia the major hospitals have international offices that are designed to assist people like us people that come in to columbia to have procedures now initially right off the bat i was working with a lady in medellin great communication it started with emails it went to whatsapp she attended the first appointment with us walked us through the process helped me pay for that filled out all the paperwork translated when we needed to right there with you the whole time and she's nice she's very sweet her name is stephanie it's really important for communication with something like this because uh the language barrier it's just huge now in cali since i was having direct communication with the doctor we were not in touch with the international office before the doctor's visit and didn't even know one existed but while we were at the doctor's office he connected us with the international office and they kind of took over on getting us the the quotes and trying to help us find some living arrangements and stuff like that they were very helpful but there was three or four different ladies we had to work with and it was all done by email and it just seemed a little more like i was a number instead of a name they did a great job but the doctor did speak fluent english so in terms of being any communication issues on that end there were none yeah the doctor spoke fluent english it was difficult to pay though because the the lady you paid in the office no english and stuff like that but both hospitals offer the service but i already had a personal connection with stephanie and medellin she did a fantastic job and this one goes to medellin right so the next three categories kind of all clumped together and it's the living experience but the first one is neighborhoods that we felt like we would want to live in for two and a half to three months and in cali we found two neighborhoods um they were very far apart one's antigua it's close to the downtown area it is about 20 to 25 minutes from the hospital nice little neighborhood some modern restaurants and shopping and stuff the other one is called ciudad de jardin which is kind of a suburb of cali it is 35 minutes from the hospital but what we liked about that is the environment was nice and the apartments also have parking lots that our van would be able to stay in so those are the two neighborhoods we found in cali in medellin we actually when we were there before street camped one night in a neighborhood called loralis and we like this neighborhood it has a good feel to it it's safe a lot of apartment choices so we kind of zeroed in on that one in medellin and actually felt more comfortable there so medellin wins the neighborhood category you want to touch base on the cost the cost so medellin is a bit more expensive the range of apartments we were looking at and you can get a much cheaper and much more expensive but our for our style of apartment we're looking for a two-bedroom two-bath secure facility we have in medellin a thousand to thirteen hundred dollars a month in cali 800 to eleven hundred dollars a month so medellin is a little bit more pricey but seems to come with a few more benefits uh the next one the apartment choices medellin is a heavy tourism expat type of city and airbnb is big there so that's what we use as we travel around and we need a place so it was super easy there but do you want to tell them about our struggles in cali yeah i mean i i we talked to a real estate agent and uh airbnb is just not big in cali it's not something that widely used and so there was just dispersed different search engines and we quite honestly had a hard time even finding places where there was a lot of options in medellin and then the next part of the whole living experience is the vibe of the city and uh there was a clear winner on this one it was a personal choice but yeah i mean uh again cali was just a different city the climate was definitely warmer maybe not hot and humid but warm warm definitely and i didn't feel like there was as many green spaces and just as much i don't know medellin just had a really nice vibe to it um active people really some pretty parks and some rivers and some nice areas it just and that climate was definitely cooler so medellin just had a better vibe from our perspective now you know opinions vary but we really liked many yeah yeah all right so next category both cities have good shopping facilities grocery stores close to the neighborhoods it was pretty close to a tie on this one but we gave it to medellin just because we're going to be there for an extended amount of time and there may be a few comfort things we could get a little easier in medellin than in california well we actually did shopping in medellin i had to get a new pair of shoes and so we did a little more functional stuff we found cali certainly had all this stuff we just didn't have quite the experience there yeah so that one was pretty close but public transportation medellin is an internationally award-winning city when it comes to their public transportation it has a metro system that is state-of-the-art with cable cars that go to all parts of the city a train that runs down the middle a rental bikes taxis ubers a very comfortable walking city and um cali has taxis ubers and a pretty hectic bus situation so no trains like medellin has and so this one again went to medellin yeah and i think you know our opinions are kind of based on our limited view we were there in each of the cities for a few days and so you know if you're from one of these cities and our our observations weren't accurate we apologize for that um this is just kind of what we saw and what we used to make the decision so yeah all right so the next one which is super important because it is our home is van security and i'm gonna let kurt handle this one because he's in charge of that yeah so you know it's not only security but there's also some things that i want to do on the van if you guys know our shower pumps down and also i'd like to do just a other little general maintenance and so having places that are both secure and able to do that we looked at all of them there were some parkaderas and some other places and medellin looked like it just had some more options both close to the office and even a bit out of the city so again i'm sure cali has some places but we actually located some places in medellin that we felt pretty comfortable so medellin wins another category so the next two items are kind of one but we rated them as two or i rated them as two because kurt didn't even know i was putting this into the system because he did not want this to be a factor in our decision at all but i wanted to take a look at it once everything else was already categoried out and that is things to do in the city we're gonna be here for two and a half to three months i'm gonna be in physical therapy anywhere from three to five days a week this guy right here is going to go out of his mind crazy so i wanted to make sure we were somewhere that he had stuff to do now cali has some cool parks a few nice little hikes on the outskirts of town but medellin is loaded with cool interesting history and culture and neighborhoods you can visit and one of the things i'm super excited about is it's one of the top 10 cities in the world to see christmas lights um but there's a lot of one day trips around there's hikes there's a lot of stuff kirk can do and that is not factored in heavily into the plan but it is and that's good for me it's good for kurt and it's good for you guys because he's going to be able to shoot this and show you and still you'll be following our journey but you'll still be seeing cool stuff in columbia yeah now for what it's worth i told snow and i truly believe this i could find all kinds of cool interesting stuff to get into in either city i found both cities were pretty awesome um but i am super excited to explore magazine and i'm super excited to show you guys a different perspective we've shown you van life for the last few years this is an opportunity for us to show you really what it might be like if you're an expat or digital nomad or something like that and you consider medellin as a possible place to spend some extended time or even move to and so we're definitely going to be able to show you a little different different angle yeah and we're going to be immersed in the culture and the food maybe i'll even learn to speak spanish better because that's going to be necessary i don't have to do that i'm focused on rehab all right guys medellin it is we are leaving cali we are northbound headed back to medellin if you remember it was a very long hectic drive but on this trip back up we've got some time because i still need to lose nine more pounds and there's some really cool stuff along the way we're going back up through the coffee triangle the andes mountain i'm just telling you guys there is some cool stuff coming before we get this surgery so we'll see you guys in a few days from our next destination which is supposed to be a really cool place to camp so with that thanks guys cheers cheers if you like this video be sure to subscribe to our channel and hit that notification bell so you guys know when we put out new videos and don't forget you can always follow us over on instagram to see what's going on in between videos cheers guys
2021-11-22 02:17