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OK, yeah, it’s been on magazine covers, featured on 60 Minutes.
But when Robin Cook uses medical tourism as the backdrop in his new medical thriller, “Foreign Bodies,” … well, who keeps up with medical trends more than has Dr. Cook?
I blogged this at The Bridge, in more detail, here.
I’d love to swap an autographed copy of Beauty from Afar for one of “Foreign Body.” Maybe someday … 
jss @ August 8, 2008
Humor, It's Personal, Medical Tourism Comments (0)
The American Medical Association has released guidelines for medical travel and tourism. This is pretty big news, in the part of the world that concerns itself with the globalization of medical care and services.
I’ve already blogged about this at The Bridge, where I have the nine principles as stated by the AMA.
The principles had not appeared on the AMA site with the initial media release, but I got them direct from the AMA after a phone call. For the moment, The Bridge is the only place you can find them.
I didn’t say this “over there” since it’s not a place where I allow myself to pat myself on the back … but every time medical travel and tourism gets recognized for what it is, an important and global phenomenon, I feel proud to have been on top of it years ago, and to have written Beauty from Afar.
jss @ June 17, 2008
It's Personal, On Writing (and/or Media) Comments (0)
The “first” Robert Benchley was the one I thought I sort of knew, as much as you can know someone who died 11 years before you were born. He wrote brilliantly and hilariously for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, won an Oscar and, by all accounts, acquitted himself with distinction at the Algonquin in New York. Up there with Dorothy Parker, et. al.
Among his more self-deprecating bons mots:
“It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”
We should all be so lucky. Few could be arguably as skilled.
R.B. is buried in the family plot on Nantucket. My partner, Nancy, and I didn’t visit there this past weekend, in our time on Nantucket. We were with a living Benchley, Rob (the third) and his lovely wife Carol, and we didn’t talk about literature or the family tree much at all. We were too busy enjoying the present tense … good food, long walks along the sand bluffs in Sconset, the bustle of an island household, Rose the tennis-ball fixated dog, skinnydipping in the Atlantic and stops in town to visit boutiques where Nancy would like to sell her fiber artist clothing creations … mostly scarves and ponchos, but she’ll make about anything if someone gets her going and wants something specific. Benji’s Boutique, a new place on Easy Street, took all of her scarves and wants more, besides. And that was the point of the trip, which made it a happy one in every way that it could be.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. I hadn’t really had any idea about the Benchley family tree. “A lot of cousins,” the present day Rob said, laconically. Which was plenty to go on, when I got home. There was a lot of begatting in the Benchley family. They include the writer and actor Nat and also Peter, most famous for writing Jaws … Peter and Nat’s dad, Nathaniel Benchley wrote children’s literature, was a biographer of Humphrey Bogart’s and wrote the novel on which the 1961 movie The Russians are Coming was based.
There are probably more famous Benchleys. That is as far as I got.
It is Rob III and Carol, though, who have made their mark on Nantucket island as much or more so than any of the clan, and not really because Rob is an extraordinary photographer for the local papers and sometimes for the Boston Globe. It is more because they are real islanders, deeply involved in the local community and passionate about the preservation of the natural beauty that surrounds them.
I met an older fellow on the ferry going back to the mainland who is another “real” islander, and asked him if he knew the Benchleys.
“Of course,” he said. “Rob is a real icon on the island.”
“People say the darnedest things on that boat,” Rob responded, when I told him in an e-mail about the comment.
jss @ June 11, 2008
I’m the grouchy geek, at least for today, since my laptop hard drive died. But I’m not so geeky that I’d spend any time grousing about that, since I saw (or rather, heard) it coming. The dreaded “click of death” started about three weeks ago.
Which was also about when I thought I was done with complaining about TigerDirect.com’s mishandling of my customer service inquiries … despite absolutely no help from the company, I was, in the end, able to get a replacement video card just five months after I’d made my initial inquiries about doing so. Along the way, I ranted a few times … here, here, here and here. Rather a lot, really, for an $89.95 video card. But you know — it’s the principal of the thing.
Shockingly (to me) … I got an actual apology late last week from someone who works for TigerDirect. Which actually meant more to me than getting the video card replaced. Scott B. (we’ll leave it at that) was browsing the web, ran across my blog posts and, with a minimum of fuss, had this to say:
jss @ May 19, 2008
BridgeHealth International, Inc., a medical travel and tourism company based in Denver, Colorado, has a new blog, one for which I have high hopes. Well, I should — I’m the moderator, and I spent a fair amount of time getting it up and running, and writing for it, in the last month.
The blog, called The Bridge, (catchy, huh?) is at:
www.bridgehealthinternational.com/blog
It isn’t officially launched, but it might as well be. We’ve taken the password protection off. There will be a news release on it in the next few days.
I probably will continue to write about medical tourism hereabouts, but it’s nice to have other outlets for the kind of reporting and writing about the subject that I think is important. BridgeHealth wants very much to be associated with authoritative, factual information about medical travel and the people who run it are fans of Beauty from Afar, so it works out well for both of us. When people have questions about medical travel for which I’d prefer to get first-hand answers from medical professionals or people on the ground in medical tourism destination countries, I can get the information I want from people who are in the front lines.
In this part-time venture, I’m happy to be somewhat reunited with Stephanie Sulger, another medical tourism pioneer and the founder of Medical Tours International. Stephanie was in Beauty from Afar and her company is now part of BridgeHealth. I picked a few winners in my book and she was one of them.
I know some people subscribe to my blog principally to see what I have to say about medical tourism, and I hope those folks will go take a look at The Bridge, perhaps specifically at:
Imagining Medical Travel’s Future
Medical Tourism and the Falling Dollar
and
Medical Travel: Fast Times, FastCompany …
all of which might have been written for this site but are better placed where they are, to help healthcare consumers.
I also continue to manage the Prisma Dental blog for my Costa Rican dentists, who are as busy as ever.
jss @ May 13, 2008
