Pedrogaz

I think it depends upon the disease. With heart attacks usually if you are still alive after 24 hours you will recover and live.

I'm not entirely happy with hospitals from the germ point of view...nosocomial (hospital acquired) infections can often be with resistant organisms, so I tend to resist going to the hospital for anything, especially minor stuff...or stuff they can do little about. A lot of this stuff like dengue fever, they get you into the hospital bed and won't let you out for days, even when there is no treatment for it. It simply winds up the bill......you may as well be lying in your own bed at home taking paracetamol or whatever it is they charge you an arm and a leg for. Same with heart attack, they often keep you in to wind up the bill way after the period you are likely to die (ie 1st 24 hours).

I'm not sure Thai hospitals are worse than in many other countries but I had a friend here who was told he needed major, major surgery. He went back home and was told he didn't have cancer and didn't need his bowel removed. I would not have any expensive or major surgery here without having 2 or 3 opinions, with at least one from a top hospital like Bumrumgrad.

The one that I hate is "They don't even speak English" as a criticism of a waiter or shop assistant.

Who but an American or British would say such a thing? I have been expat for over half of my life (I'm 67)....everywhere I go I meet expats who don't even bother to try to learn the local language, but rely on the locals addressing them in English. Absolute arrogance, especially as we expect them to speak English if they visit US or UK.

Thailand 47th???? With 58 deaths and only 3000 odd cases....ridiculous. One of the safest places on earth. Well done the government. I am not someone who gives the military style junta government much credit.....but in this case they have performed admirably. 

I have an unpopular view on this statue vandalism. These men were men of the establishment and the statues were erected in their esteem. Historically they tell us what the society valued at the time they were erected. That they erected statues to slavers, writers of hymns and brutal colonists tells us something about the values at the time.

Britain was still building its empire and getting rich off the slave trade that our American cousins used so well after killing off all their natives. It was a brutal time and to deny it by pulling down all the statues is simply vandalism that achieves nothing.

Not a single black man in America will get better treatment from the police there because a stupid statue that I bet 90% of people who walked past it didn't even know who it was or what he did. My answer would be to put a large plaque there informing everybody that values have now changed and the statue is of a terrible slaver.

There is a statue in Central Park NY of a surgeon Dr Marion Simms that is extremely controversial. He performed experimental surgery without anaesthetic on black slave women. He was revered because he found the surgical answer to a problem frequent in black women at the time....which is where a fistula develops between the womb and the colon and feral material enters the womb and comes out via the vagina. The smell from this condition was truly awful and the women, of course, lost their men and were ostracised. Well Simms came up with the solution so that it is not a condition we even hear about today in the modern world. Yes doing surgery without anaesthetic is an awful thing to do....but to invent a procedure that improve the quality of so many women's lives is praiseworthy.

Our problem today is that we take a Manichean view on everything...everything is black or white, good or bad....whereas most people are a bit of both.

Russia and China should do what US does in such cases. Ignore the UN and trade as normal with Iran without using the dollar. They should also sell modern arms to Iran.

I worked in this industry. It is dirty.

There are (or were) 5 direct flights a day from Wuhan to Thailand......if this were true then Thailand would have a major, major problem with coronavirus as about 6 million Chinese tourists would have traipsed through the country. To me sounds like the US trying to get everyone against China again.