The Truth About Medical Tourism in Vietnam

Thailand, Turkey, Malaysia, the UAE, these are all very well-known places for medical and dental tourism. But what a lot of people don't realize is Vietnam is up and coming. Last year, I shared a video going to public and private hospitals, Chinese medicine, and to dentists. This year, I've come back and I have lots to share about the good, the bad, the things that I would do differently. Now, I don't like doing sit-down videos like this. However, this is medical and I want to make sure I share all of the details with you correctly, including the costs. Now, if you're new to the channel, welcome. You should know that I am a tax-paying Canadian resident, but I don't qualify for free Canadian healthcare and that's because I'm out of the country for too long. I'm not complaining about that because it does allow me to travel full-time with my partner who is Indonesian. And also, it allows us to check out what our healthcare options are abroad. Now, last year, we did extensive testing, both of us. This year, I wanted to check out a couple of things that I needed to work on. I added a few things to the list and unfortunately, we had two medical emergencies that I will share where we went and what happened. Traditional disclaimer, I am not a healthcare expert or a medical professional. If you're seeking medical advice, you should speak to a doctor or an expert. This is simply my experience. I will say this, I paid for everything. Nothing was sponsored. And if you have gotten a pen and a paper out, don't worry about it. Right here, there's a QR code. Down below, there is a link in the description and it links to an article that shares with you everything I did, where I went, all of the costs. I think I've covered all the necessary details. So, let's get into the fun stuff. What did we do? First up is Dexascan. So, last year, I went to Vinmec International Hospital in Da Nang. I was shocked that I could actually just walk in without an appointment and get a Dexascan to measure my bone density. That was fantastic. I had my results in under an hour. But the bad news was, I discovered I had osteopenia. I didn't know what that was, but it turns out it's the precursor to osteoporosis. And in your 40s, up to 25% of women already have it. The good news is that once you know, osteopenia can be addressed. So, this year, I started taking HRT, both estrogen patches and oral progesterone, in hopes that it would address some of my osteopenia issues. And I chose to go back to Vinmec, but this time in Saigon. Different experience, a slightly older hospital, but same experience, not needing to have an appointment. I walked in and within an hour, I was out with my results. Unfortunately, I still have osteopenia, so I have some work to do there, but both visits only cost $25 US. Let's talk about preventative health with blood work. Now, last year, I went to Hospital 199, a public hospital in Da Nang that has a medical tourism unit, which is actually very affordable. And I had x-rays and ultrasounds and blood work and scans, and it was fantastic. But I didn't really think that I needed to have everything tested a year later, but there were some things that I wanted to check up on. Specifically, I was low in iron in the previous year and low in testosterone. So, the great thing is in Ho Chi Minh City, there is a unit of blood laboratories called Diag. Basically, you can go in there and they have different packages of testing that you can do, or you can order individual tests. They have basically a menu. You can do whatever you want. And the great thing is you can order from Xalo. So, Xalo is the WhatsApp of Vietnam, and it's legit. Hospitals are on it. Businesses are on it. It's a great place to make appointments, and it's also really great if you're worried about not speaking Vietnamese or people not understanding you, because you can translate with Google Translate. I reached out to them on Xalo. They have packages for women, for men, for seniors, and I wanted to check their packages, what it costs against the individual tests that I wanted to take. And they were able to actually work out for me that it was better for me to take the individual tests. So, they booked the appointment, took all my information, and told me I had a month to go to whatever Diag was closest to me. So, when I showed up, I waited about 10 minutes. They withdrew several vials of blood, painless. And a few hours later, my results were available online with instructions that if I wanted to talk to someone about the results, they were happy to have me go to one of the clinics and I could speak to someone. I tested a lot. Not only follow-ups from the previous year, but also new preventative things that I had learned about to watch out for as you get older. The good news, I had corrected my low iron, which is fantastic because I hated taking those iron pills. My calcium, my vitamin D were very good. My metabolic panel, my liver enzymes, my inflammation marker, and several other results were very good. Now, because I had osteopenia, I was really interested in knowing my calcium and vitamin D levels. So, that does show that it's not a result of one of those things. The bad news, my free testosterone is extremely low, like in the basement. That wasn't completely surprising because I was struggling with exhaustion, brain fog, and I hadn't done anything from the previous year to address my low testosterone. So, it was now good because I could take those results and do something with it. And that led me to the next step. But first, I'll tell you, the total cost of all my blood work was $95. Now, it really depends on what you take, but in that article, I will link to the website and you can basically decide what's right for you. If you're a man, I promise this is one last thing that is specific for women, but maybe you have a woman in your life that this would be relevant for, or maybe you're looking for a recommendation for a private hospital other than Vinmec, that is FV Hospital. As I said, I was exhausted. I was only able to work two hours a day, which is terrifying for being self-employed. I just felt very flat emotionally. And so, with the tests that I previously had, I was able to reach out to FV Hospital by Zalo. Before going to the appointment and booking it, I asked them if they could confirm if the OBGYN there actually prescribed testosterone for women. Not everybody does. And they confirmed that they could. And so, I sent over my DIAG test, my Hospital 199 test for the year before, the two DEXA scans, and currently what I was taking with the progesterone and the estrogen, just so the doctor was kind of briefed before I came. Because to be honest, I feel like sometimes women really have to fight to get what they want and what they need. So, I was booked with the OBGYN and I found out that it was a male doctor. To be honest, I was a little bit nervous about that as a woman, but that lasted like two minutes. So, FV Hospital, amazing. Amazing service. It's just like top notch. I met with Dr. Chung, perfect English speaker. He really listened to me. So, we went through all my tests, my experience, how I was feeling and coping and how the last year had been since taking the estrogen and progesterone. And he agreed with me, actually, that he thought I was a good candidate for testosterone and we should try it out for three weeks. Day seven, I felt like, ding, a light had been turned on. My life totally changed. It was like I was living in like grayscale. And all of a sudden, everything was in color. I could work eight hours a day. I had much better mood. I actually felt joy. And so, it has been very positive for me. Of course, for different people, they react differently to it, but it was very positive. And when we had our three-week check-in, he was also very excited because he saw that there were some other people that perhaps could also benefit from this. So, I'm really interested to see in a year, it is not clinically proven at all, but there is some suggestion that testosterone could help build bone and it might help with my DEXA scan. I think we'll see next year. And would you believe the cost of that consultation was 25 US dollars? And it has changed my life. Now, not all of our healthcare was planned. One night at 1030 on a Saturday night, Alan was lying on the bed with his arms stretched out like this, and I flopped on top of him. His arm went back and he heard a pop and he was in major pain. And I thought, did you just dislocate your shoulder? What do we do? Neither of us knew. He was in pain, wanted to wait until the next day to go to a clinic, but I did a quick search on Google and discovered that if that happens to you, you need to go to a hospital right away. Thankfully, in District 1, there is a public hospital just across from Benton Market. And so, we went to the emergency room there. Now, it's a bit of an older hospital that has been newly renovated. And because it was a public hospital, we did not expect anyone to speak English. But actually, that wasn't the case at all. We were able to easily check in and a lot of the doctors just got out Google Translate so that we knew that we weren't having anything lost in hand signaling and translation. And they decided that right away, he should probably just go get an x-ray and we agreed. When you go to Vietnam to a public hospital, they ask you to put a deposit down first. So they basically evaluate, you decide what the process is going to be, you put down the deposit, and then they do the services. The great thing about that is you're never surprised about what the bill will be because you prepaid it. And actually, we've done this before and twice, they've given us money back. So in this case, I put $100 down for some things that I wanted to do, including an x-ray, which we thought was really the only thing we needed to do. But we went in, he had the x-ray, and I think we waited about half an hour for it. Turns out no broken bones, no separated shoulder. So that was fantastic. And we didn't need to pursue anything else. So we got $40 back. And then I think we paid $5 worth of medication. So all in all, just for peace of mind, it was $65. And Alan felt really bad about it. I felt bad for jumping on him, but I did not feel bad that we paid $65. Because if you do have something wrong, it can get bad really fast. And that was money well spent. I had most of the planned healthcare, but Alan decided to do some heavy lifting and also had another emergency situation. He woke me up on a Tuesday at 2am to tell me he had pushed a q-tip too far into his ear. Now, we've all been there. We know we're not supposed to push it in that far. But we do. At 2am, I knew that we wouldn't be able to see anyone. So I told him that we would have to wait until the next morning. And he was really worried about this. I kind of thought, to be honest, he was being unreasonable. And I feel bad about that. Because the next morning, he showed me that he had a photo of the q-tip and there was blood on it. He was terrified that he had punctured his eardrum. Thankfully, I discovered that eight minutes from our apartment in D1 was the first city ENT private clinic. So we walked in in English, were able to explain what was happening. And within 20 minutes, we saw a doctor. The doctor spoke perfect English. And he put a camera into Alan's ear as we watched on a video screen. The good news, Alan hadn't punctured his eardrum at all. The bad news was that Alan had actually been scraping his ear canals with the q-tip and causing the bleeding himself. So here's a fun fact that I did know before this happened. Westerners, most of us have really waxy ears and it kind of gets disgusting. But a lot of Asians, including Alan, actually have dry, flaky wax. It's not wet at all. So Alan kept using a q-tip because he thought something was in his ear. He could feel something was off, but it was actually the dried, crusty skin that the q-tip was taking off his ear. So it was like this cycle. And finally he rubbed his canal raw. So the doctor wanted to test his ear just to make sure that that was the only issue. So we went downstairs in the clinic for another test and everything came back normal. It was fantastic. So he told Alan no more q-tips, which to be honest, Alan has not used a q-tip since, which is great. And also gave us some medication. And then he also, the doctor gave him his WhatsApp number in case something happened and said, you can contact me anytime, 24 seven. That was amazing. The whole visit took an hour and the cost for the consultation, the testing and the medication all together was $65. And he will never see another q-tip again. Now, a lot of people want to know about dental tourism in Vietnam. And my video from last year actually covers a lot of it. I had gone to both a dentist in Ho Chi Minh city and also in Da Nang needing to get a tooth pulled in each location. And so I think a lot of that will cover your question, but Vietnamese dentists are amazing. You can go very high end if you need to get basically all crowns and like major reconstructive surgery. A lot of Australians actually go to Vietnam and there are tours based around it, which I think is crazy, but also fantastic. If you are worried about going to a new country to go to the dentist this year, we did go to a dentist in Ho Chi Minh city. We picked the dentist that was four minute walk from our apartment. It cost us 27 us dollars and it was well worth it for a cleaning. I wanted to go to a more local place versus where I went last year, where they had perfect English. And it was super easy because it was just a cleaning. There was no problem at all. We did everything with Google translate. That's just kind of how it is when you're in Vietnam. And finally, I went to get glasses. So I have very thick prescriptions. They're thick, they're strong and very expensive in Canada. So I'm always looking to get eyewear abroad because I have to always be wearing prescription glasses or prescription sunglasses. Last year, I went to a optician in Da Nang. It was fantastic. They were cheap and they were also able to fit my very thick glasses into like a fashionable frame. And I think I might have spent 25 or 30 us dollars. It'll be in that video. But what I did realize was I made the mistake of asking for blue light filter, which an optician once told me that actually it doesn't really do much and you don't need to worry about it. But that's not the reason why I needed new glasses. The blue light was causing a blue reflection in both photos and videos. So you can see I'm facing a window right now and it's just like a white light, which is much less distracting. So I wanted to splurge for some reason. And so I had gone to Shady. It's called Shady specifically because they had this French brand of Essilor lenses. So I wanted to know what it was like to actually spend more money to get a premium set of lenses. And I went there and said, this is what I want. And they were actually really helpful. They checked my prescription just to make sure that it was still the right one for me. And they also gave me a bit of a discount because it, to be honest, these lenses are expensive. They're imported from France. In the end, I spent 170 US dollars on these lenses. They are fantastic. But I think I might have made a mistake there because I learned that Hoya from Japan is considered kind of the competitor to Essilor. And instead of being 170, those lenses are usually 40 to 80 dollars. So in the end, I really liked where I went and I would actually go back to them and I would ask them if they have Hoya because they are available in Vietnam. So, you know, you learn, you spend 170 US dollars, but the 170 I've spent on this is still a hundred dollars, 150 dollars cheaper than what I would have spent if I bought these in Canada. So I now have a good pair. So not surprising. I'm still very impressed with health care in Vietnam, especially for routine or preventative health care, but also actually for emergencies. Now we know. The next time I go there, I'm going to continue to check up on things, the DEXA scan, my osteopenia, also check more levels, go back to see Dr. Chung. And I also want to see dermatologists because after decades in the sun, I'm really starting to notice the effects. If you have a suggestion for that, any questions about health care in Vietnam, please let me know in the comments below and I'll see you next week.