In defense of drunk tourists.

I was shocked when my wife was rushed into hospital on Koh Samui recently. Shocked by the state-of-the-art ambulance. Shocked to find four medics inside it. Shocked that all this was for Delhi belly.

The hospital was equally luxurious. We’d come from a beach-hut where a rat lived in the toilet and ate our soap. So clean bedding excited us, AC made us tremble and the five-course meal - I nearly fainted. At least I was in the right place. I struggled to fathom this luxury; it’s hard to concentrate with six nurses arranging your wife. I was forced to stand on the balcony. I watched the nurses leave. And come back. Leave. And come back. Like waves crashing onto the shore, leaving behind some medical or housekeeping jetsam.

The epiphany.
Going for assessment we felt like adventurers in some futuristic space-station. Dials flashed, machines brooded, staff ignored us with quiet efficiency. Just how had this amazing place come about? It was no surprise that Westerners filled each bed: busted heads, broken limbs, twisted ankles. Sorry sights, self inflicted. That’s when it hit me. A beautiful thing was happening.

The drunks of the world had made this amazing facility.

Drunk topless yobs crashing motorbikes. Girls in bikinis falling off tables. Hairy louts with bad tattoos waking in agony, without the faintest clue where they were the night before. It was these people that had made this amazing facility. The drinking classes. That much maligned part of society. Armed only with a complete lack of self awareness, a favourable exchange rate and a travel insurance policy. They made all of it. It seemed the ne’er-do-wells had done well.

Trickledown effect.
And all unsung, unlike your sanctimonious colleague getting you to fund skydives, or celebrities fundraising for starving photo-opportunities. Drunks: quiet heroes, funding amazing hospitals. Hospitals the government is now using to drive growth using health tourism. And the trickledown effect? For your average backpacker, the trickledown effect involves bodily fluid and legs. But there’s more than that. In Koh Tao, every third or fourth shop is a doctor’s surgery. And every surgery’s window promotes the same best selling services:

Wound dressings
Pregnancy tests
Blood checks.

A succinct summary of the backpacker experience - get drunk, fall over, have sex, fall over again - but also of just how much medical training and infrastructure now exists, benefiting average Thais. Drunks have achieved what the G20 couldn’t, what politicians discuss only because Bob Geldof is glowering.

Is this the answer to world development? Take a poor country. Export some drunks. Wait. Wait. Bingo! You’ve got world-class medical facilities, we’ve exported our idiots, everyone’s a winner!

Maybe not. Getting obnoxiously drunk all the time is not cool. But, next time you happen to be walking down the road on some Thai island and have to step over a comatose girl in a bikini, while tonight’s conquest vomits down his shirt, don’t tut. They’re helping make the world a better place. And they don’t even know it.

See this post published here: http://tinyurl.com/l3y9yf

http://www.thailandmusings.com/living-in-thailand/thailand-healthcare/boom-time-for-medical-tourism/