Robin Cook - Foreign Body Review

Read on 22-05-2011

The subject of this so called Medical Thriller is medical tourism. A medical student Jennifer Hernandez comes to know that her grandmother is dead and that too on the other side of the globe in India. Grandma Fernandez had come all the way to India to undergo a hip replacement surgery. The cost of a hip replacement surgery in India is $5000 compared to $20000-$40000 in USA. (I checked the rates just now). Well like Granny a lot of people from US came to get their surgeries done and also had the photo op at the Taj Mahal for free. This got the healthcare barons in the States real worried and they devised a scheme to stop the outflow of patients from the US. The scheme was simple. Show the world the pitfalls of coming to India and have the data to prove it. The flaw in the plan was that the data was flawless. Indian healthcare in the private sector was too good. So they decided to create bad data by bumping of patients from the US after their surgeries and passing on the info to CNN. Jennifer comes to investigate and her boyfriend follows her, she takes the help of her closest friend and mentor Laurie who comes to India as well, with her husband. Mr Cook then proceeds straight to the main course where we have more murders, incest and a view of what the Indian bureaucracy does in a crisis situation -- buries it's head in the sand. After 400 pages Mr. Cook realizes that there are too many loose ends and so he cooks up a potpourri and ended up keeping it semi cooked. The novel started off well, nice & slow and in some cases with too much detail, but in the end he kind of lost plot and tried to a 0 - 60 kmph in less than a second. If you are waiting for a connecting flight or a train or have nothing else to do. Pick up the book, otherwise just let it be.

However to be fair to the author, he raised two important questions

1.) will the western health care sector try to sabotage the Indian Medical tourism industry??? Is the lancet coverage of NDM Super bug a part of that scheme??

2.) The profits from the private healthcare are not flowing into improving public healthcare which is in dire straits but are only fattening the wallets of biz tycoons who are running the facilities.

These questions wouldn't have arisen in my mind if I hadn't read the book.