Note: this is a product and service review reflecting the opinion of WoWasis. It is not to be construed as a medical recommendation. For all medical recommendations, consult your own trusted physician.

Whew! Now that the disclaimer’s out of the way, let’s tell you about the medical checkup we got at Bangkok’s Bumrungrad Hospital. We’d noticed a few aches and pains, and chose to get a checkup at Bumrungrad, not because it’s the cheapest in Bangkok (it isn’t), but because of the good care we’d gotten there in the past. As of this date, Bumrungrad offers six different Health Screening Programs. We weren’t sure which was the right one for us, so we asked to discuss them with a doctor there first.

Based on what we were dealing with, the doctor recommended the Executive Examination, which includes, among other things, Complete Blood Count (CBC), Blood Sugar, Cholesterol, Gout, Creatinine, ALT and ALP Liver Function Panels, EKG, Abdomen Ultrasound, and Chest X-Ray. That program cost 7,770 baht ($250 USD) for men, 9,140 baht ($294 USD) for women.

Pay the fee upfront, and your tests begin 5 minutes later. Yes, we said five minutes, no waiting. You are taken by a friendly attendant to one test station after another, until you’re finished two hours or so later. Before you leave, you consult with your first doctor one more time, who tells you if he or she sees anything initially important, after having seem most of the test results. You are asked to come by the next day to pick up the full report.

Our medical report came in a handsome 10 page tabbed and plastic-covered folder. It included all test results, something we could easily use as a baseline when we return to our home country. Included in the report was the EKG graph.  Bumrungrad keeps good records. We’d done a similar checkup in 2008, and the new report (2013) made the comment that the findings had not significantly changed in five years.

In our opinion, $250 USD is a pretty decent price to pay for this kind of workup, and the fact that you can walk in off the street and get it done in two hours makes it a lot easier than it would have been in our own country. And having it all nicely laid out in a take-home folder is great, too. We can keep it as a record and have documentation for our own medical personnel at home, too.

As we mentioned, Bumrungrad is not the only hospital in Bangkok that does this, and you should always seek more than one opinion on any medical choice. We were happy with our own results, and do recognize that the process of getting this kind of checkup would have cost us far more, and taken far longer to complete, in our own country.