Joemikeb, how was your hospital stay any different than one in a third world country?
For one thing my hospital stay here was probably many times more expensive than it would have been in most third world hospitals. All the rooms in the hospital here are private rooms each with its own bathroom and cable television while in third world countries the norm is a ward.
I was continuously monitored through a wireless connection to the central monitoring station no matter where I was on the campus, while third world monitoring norm is more likely limited to a stethoscope around the neck of the attending nurse or physician. Very few third world hospitals could afford the CT scanner, Nuclear scanner, cardiac sonography, and gadgetry, I was tested with nor would they likely have been equipped to do the nuclear stress test of the heart. (I have never been fond of treadmill stress testing but chemical stress testing is a bit scary.) That is not to say that such equipment is unknown in the third world, but it is not the
standard of practice as it is here. (Truth be known it may not be the "standard of practice" in some small town hospitals less than 100 miles from here.)
As far as the qualifications of the physicians in attendance of the approximately two dozen
hospitalists on staff all but four or five of them are of East Asian, Pakistani, and Sikh background and I presume training. My personal physician is from India, and the attending cardiologist from Eastern Europe. The ER doctor is from Austin, Texas (and Austin is sometimes weird enough to be like another country
) . So they would be equally qualified whether they were practicing here, in India, Thailand, or wherever. The nurses I came in contact with were all trained either at Tarrant County Community College or Texas Women's University (one of the finest nursing schools in the country). They were uniformly great but I have no standard of comparison between them and nurses in third world situations although in some countries nursing care would have been the duty of my family and not a professional nurse.
Whether the treatment was better or worse than a third world country would provide is arguable. It was definitely more comfortable and probably resulted in a more definitive diagnosis. In my case it turns out the heart was definitely
not the cause of the shortness of breath and chest pains. As it is my condition is currently classified as a "mystery" so my odds for full recovery would have been the same in either realm - unless a doctor going solely on the presenting symptoms had decided to perform a needless surgery.
