South Korea Medical Tourism Diary. Part 6: Hanyang University Medical Center and trip to Busan

Continued from Part 5: Ajou University Hospital

November 28, 2007

We spent about 3 hours at most of the hospitals we visited, but had time for only a relatively brief visit to Hanyang University Medical Center. We started off in the Health Promotion Center, which offers comprehensive, low-cost checkups. They do a fairly brisk business with Korean Americans and expats. There's no mechanism right now to bring in foreign visitors but they are considering establishing one. The hospital has an arrangement with the Intercontinental Hotel, which is about 15 minutes away by taxi and contains a large shopping mall. Mr. Daihee Kim is the coordinator for foreign patients.

The hospital does a good volume of orthopedic surgeries, including knee and hip replacements. Although they do a lot of stomach surgery (because of the prevalence of gastric cancer) there hasn't been demand for bariatric surgery. Koreans just aren't obese enough to need it.

There is a specialized rheumatology hospital next to the health promotion center with 57 beds and about 350 outpatient visits per day. We met with Sang-Cheol Bae, MD, PhD, MPH (who lived near me in Brookline when he was working at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in the mid-90s). He handles many Lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients and the hospital also sees a lot of scleredoma, gout, and osteoarthritis. Dr. Bae said that he received cases from around the world, but it wasn't completely clear to me that it would be warranted for a typical rheumatology patient to travel all the way to Korea for diagnosis and treatment.

We still had a bit of time left so someone had the idea to bring us on a tour of the emergency department. I could have done without that, personally. The ER was reasonably modern, but nothing special. In my short visit I didn't come away convinced that it was a deeply caring place. I was more than ready to go by the time the tour ended.

Our next stop was the main train station in Seoul. We caught the 3:30 pm KTX train to Busan, the second largest city in Korea, which is at the Southern tip of the country. The KTX is a bullet train, which can travel up to 300 kilometers per hour (more than 180 miles per hour). The train is smooth and quiet. It's usually not going at the top speed but there is a TV monitor on board that displays the current speed. I saw it get above 290 kph a couple of times. You wouldn't guess you're traveling so fast but at one point we were traveling next to a highway and we were going about triple the speed of the cars and trucks.

When we arrived at Busan we took a cab ride to the Westin Chosun Hotel, a very nice place that is typical of some of the nicer Westins I've stayed in. The hotel is right on the beach and my room had an excellent view of the water. Like the Shilla in Seoul, the Westin had rechargeable flashlights and smoke hoods in the guest rooms. I wonder if that is a national requirement. In any case it is reassuring. At both the Shilla and Westin all of my calls were answered on the first ring. I love that.

We went out for dinner to a high-end Korean restaurant, which served us course after course of food. Our guide explained it all to us and most everything I tried --including various types of noodles, fish and seaweed-- was good. It will still take me a long time to develop a taste for the Korean staple kimchi.

We saw a number of Western chains in Busan. (I'm sure they're also in Seoul but we had less of a chance to get out and about.) I saw Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, TGIF's, Subway and Quiznos.

See Part 7: Good Gang-An Hospital