Our Services
- Arranging the Off-Site Second Opinion with the major Japanese hospitals
- Getting appointment for medical check-up in Japanese hospitals or in check-up centers
- Comprehensive assistance to the medical travel to Japan as a medical coordinator
- Sharing Information on cutting edge researches in Japan, job opportunities in Japan, Japan related News
- Assisting in Medical Technology Transfer
- Human Resource Consulting
Contact
Medical Travel Helpdesk
Email: support@japan-medical-tourism.com
Fax: 81-50-3503-9210
The following outline guides you through how our helpdesk assists your medical travel.
1. Research before making the decision
Before deciding to recieve medical treatments overseas, it is important that you speak to as many medical professionals as you can, and do research about the treatment options and alternatives. For each treatment, it is advisable to check the potential complications, and recovery processes to ensure the sufficient length of stay so that you will be under medical supervision until the complications no longer pose a threat to your health.
Once you identify the treatments you wish to take, you are strongly advised to speak to your doctor in your own country to know that the type of treatments you are seeking overseas are not available in the local hospital. Even when the doctor could not offer any recommendations, your doctor is still the best available resource and his/her advise will help you to clear your safety concerns for the travel and health condition.
We can give you a list of treatment options which may fit your health conditions, and provide the literature to study further on the treatments.
2. Choose a doctor and hospital
Medical Statistics and clinical data
For a majority of medical traveler, selecting hospitals is a daunting task. It is important to choose hospitals so that his/her personal safety is ensured. Mortality / survival rates, and volume of procedures are usually the most relevant data to know the quality of treatments in a hospital. While the track records on the procedure and medical statistics may help, most hospitals do not disclose the statistics unless it is required by the authority.
We collected the vast amount of articles in our clinical outcome database, and can help you to find the relevant statistics on government surveys, academic literature, and studies by journalist organization.
Emergency care
Emergency in medical travel is extremely rare, but chances are not zero. It is wise to choose the hospital with good emergency care facility (or ICU).
Cost
Costs in addition to the treatment may be incurred during the travel. If the treatment option involves anesthesia, outpatient (no overnight stays in hospital) may not be possible. You must think of the overall costs including the cost of stay and post treatment medication cost if any. If you need the cost estimates, we may be able to assist you by comparing the cost of the related treatments.
Think about the worst scenario
Since the probability of medical accident cannot be zero, it may be advantageous to use the medical travel broker or medical coordinator who can offer the legal advise, and ensure the safe travel back to home.
Our medical travel helpdesk can assist you to find the good medical coordinator (or broker) who can help you on anything related to the medical travel.
3. How to contact a hospital
Language Barrier
Many physicians / doctors in Japan speak English, but the fewer number of assistants and receptionists can. If you contact the hospital, you often face language barriers at the reception or with telephone operators.
Email to our medical travel helpdesk (support@japan-medical-tourism.com), if you wish to get helps from someone who interprets / translate your inquiry to the hospital.
Appointment
In order to make an appointment with a hospital, you must have the reference letter from your current hospital.
If you cannot obtain the reference (or introductory) letter, you may consider:
- Check up
- Walk-in consultation
For the check up, you can make appointment without the reference letter. Walk-in consultation is suited for the patient willing to consider a long stay in Japan.
Desicion for the hospital admission is made on the clinical merits that each hospital can offer to the patients. Our medical travel helpdesk can assist you to get the appointment from your preferred hospitals.
Check up
Depending on the nature of your medical conditions, it is advisable to go through the medical check up. Having the medical check up is the typical pathway to recieve the treatments in japan. Regardless of your previous check-up or diagnosis, it is required before any kinds of procedure or treatment.
Email to our medical travel helpdesk (support@japan-medical-tourism.com), if you wish us to arrange the medical check-up in Japan.
Walk-in Consultation
Walk-in consultation is the most common way to see the doctor, but the hospital may unknowingly arrange the follow-up appointment with a date unreasonable for a travel. It is not recommended for the traveler unless the patient stays indefinitely long duration in Japan, or travel at least three times (consultation, check-up, treatment).
Off-Site Second Opinion (Recommended in the first instance)
We realize that most of the patients do not know the suitability of the target treatments in Japan before considering medical travel. We strongly recommend that you will seek the off-site second opinion in the first instance to know the standard and alternative views of the Japanese medical professionals.
We are often asked by foreign patients to check with the hospital if the certain treatments are applicable to the patient. But the diagnosis and analysis has to take a great deal of human resources, particularly the time of the doctors who are always busy with Japanese patients in the long waiting list. Second Opinion will help hopsitals to finance the allocation of the doctor's time for foreign patients, and most importantly, the patients will have the reliable opportunity to know the effectiveness and risk of the treatments available in Japan.
Some medical institutions provide off-site second opinion to the patient. If you seriously consider getting admissions into Japanese hospitals, we believe it is essential to go through the second opinion session.
Email to our medical travel helpdesk (support@japan-medical-tourism.com), if you wish us to arrange the off-site second opinion.
On-Site Second Opinion
If you have difficulties to get the reference letter from your physician in charge, and wants to let he/she has chances to get alternative medical views for your current medical treatments, second opinion may be requested to the hospitals in Japan. Second opinion session is appointment basis, and you will need to bring your medical records (CT / MR / PET / diagnosis letters, etc) when you see a doctor. You need to bear in mind that you will not get any check-ups or treatments from second opinion session.
Cost for the second opinion to the foreign patient is usually from 100,000 JPY to 150,000 JPY (about $1000 USD). If the patient speaks Japanese, second opinion could be about 300 USD on average.
Volunteering for the Clinical Trials of Regenerative Treatment/Therapy
In contrast to the clinical trials of drugs or chemotherapy, treatments using the patient's own immune systems and stem cells are known to pose lower risks.
Under the controlled supervision, patients may benefit from entering into the clinical trials of the regenerative treatment. For those new treatments and therapies, there may be the risk of the contamination in the cell cultures, but this risk is applied to any established cell based treatments. Quality control in Japanese cell processing center seems to be so far well managed, as implied by many of the recent promising clinical outcomes.
Compared to the drug trials, regenerative treatment is safer and tends to pose very low or is associated with no complications. Also, there is no cost other than travel, stay costs, and translator / interpreter fees. But the required stay duration for clinical trials could be much longer than expected, which could be problematic for foreign patients. Patients must also bear in mind that there is a chance of patient to be classified as a placebo group, whereby the patient will take the standard treatment alone (usually, chemotherapy or chemoradiotherapy) without the new treatment. Overall, what clinical trials provide is the low cost treatment (at least, standard treatments) and above all, a hope for the improved health conditions for patients and their family.
Pre-Trial Treatments of Organ, Tract, or Duct Regeneration
For the new technology such as iPS cells, and cell sheet (cell sheet implantation / cell sheet transplantation) developed by a group of Japanese scientists, pre-trial treatment is fairly common. Organ regeneration treament driven by the development of iPS cell science is expected to be available in a few years, and so, if you need a regeneration of your gastrointestinal ducts (caused by resection or removal surgery) or heart (cardiomyopathy or other cardiovascular (heart) diseases) or of any parts of recoverable organ, pre-trial treatments may potentially benefit your health conditions immensely, and allow you to have full removal of tumors, not possible by the known surgery methods.
One of the advantages over the clinical trials is that there is no placebo group, so the patient will have the treatments without chances. But the pre-trial treatments are of experimental nature, and the risks for the treatments are usually unknown. As noted, risks for the regenerative medicine using patient's cells or DNA is deemed lower compared to the chemotherapy or some new drugs composed of toxic chemical compounds, thus it is important to ensure that patients are healthy enough to have new treatments, and are not in malignant conditions to be exposed to the complications.
4. Travel
A length of stay is the biggest concern to most travelers. It depends on medical condition, clinical urgency, type of consultation (apppointment with reference letter, second opinion, check up, etc), treatment (complications and recovery time), and post-treatment. In general, you may expect one travel for the medical check up and diagnosis, and another travel for the treatment after the result of check up comes out. In case the patient has no reference letter from the current physician in charge, patient may need to travel one more time.
Urgency
Hospitals set high priority for the treatment schedule with a patient in need of urget care. If the risk of waiting the next appointment is high, in the very first day you visit the hospital, you could be advised to have medical check up, and have treatment at the same time.
Otherwise, the follow up appointment may be a week away or later after the first meeting to wait for the diagosis of disease and for the result of check up.
Type of Consultation
If you have a reference letter from your local hospital, and made appointment, your health conditions should already be examined by the physicians. Check up could be scheduled as early as in the same day as the consultation.
For the walk-in consultation without appointment, you may need to stay a week or longer for the first travel to schedule the medical check up which may be a few days or a week later. Or, you may have three travels for the first consultation, check up, and treatment, respectively.