Here's What To Do If You Get Sick On Vacation

When you're traveling, the last thing you want to do is get sick.

But new climates, new cuisines, and stale airplane air can bring you down, to say nothing of skiing mishaps and ankles twisted on cobblestones.

As for pre-planning for medical care, who does that? We usually think of doctors and hospitals when it's too late.

We asked Dr. Mark Melrose, co-founder of Urgent Care Manhattan (and frequent surf traveler), for the medical 411 (and 911).

When do I go to an emergency room?

A health emergency exists when there is a sudden and unanticipated change in your usual state of health due to illness or injury that may cause harm to life or limb if not evaluated and stabilized promptly. Use your best judgment; it is always better to be safe than sorry.

You just may need to wait if the staff at the emergency facility don't agree with your urgency. (Bring a book or electronic devices for a pleasant diversion.)

For minor emergencies and other immediate health-care needs (I forgot my medication, Do I have strep?, I might have a UTI), look for an urgent care or other walk-in, immediate-care medical practice.

Can I trust a hotel doctor?

Hotels that have a recommended house physician have usually vetted their medics in the same way they would investigate any high-profile employee. Since hotels are not primarily in the health-care business, they are not interested in losing you as a client if the medical service/care is of questionable quality. In general, the quality of the doctor is a reflection of the quality of the hotel.

In-room consultations are usually pricey and most often require payment in cash or with a credit card at the time of service.

Are there simple measures I can take before I leave that can my life easier in the event of a medical issue?

Here are six steps to prevent medical problems when traveling:

1. Carry medications in their original bottles and a list of medications and dosages with you at all times. Bring extra, and keep them in two separate, safe places in case you lose your luggage or carry-on.

2. Carry a list of any medical conditions and surgeries and your doctors' telephone numbers.

3. Pack a simple first-aid kit:
- bandages in various sizes
- antiseptic
- antibiotic ointment
- tweezers for splinters
- ibuprofen (Advil) or acetaminophen (Tylenol) for pain or fever
- antihistamine for allergies
- motion-sickness tablets
- anti-diarrhea medicine
- A prescription from your primary care doctor for a broad-spectrum antibiotic to cover skin infections, UTIs, or upper respiratory infections, or traveler's diarrhea will be useful in a pinch.
- While not strictly medical, you'll be glad you packed condoms, sunscreen, and a spare pair of perscription glasses just in case.

4. Don't sit in one place for too long (train/bus/plane) to avoid deep vein thrombosis (blood clots in the legs).

5. Make sure your accommodations are user-friendly if you have disabilities or physical limitations.

6. Check the CDC website for travel health alerts and immunizations that might be required for countries on your itinerary.

Will my insurance work when I am overseas?

Check your policy, as well as premium credit card membership privileges, for overseas health coverage benefits before you go — and before you purchase duplicate coverage you may not need.

Should I buy travel insurance in case of medical emergencies?

This depends on your personal willingness to assume risk, your medical history, and the nature of your voyage. If you will be ice climbing in the Andes or scuba diving with great white sharks in Cape Town, or going to a remote location, then travel, health, and Medivac insurances are a fine idea. Ditto if you have a chronic medical condition that could confound local doctors.

Would you give the same advice to people who go on active vacations (say, ER doctors who love to surf in Mexico) as you would to people who go to Paris for a leisurely weekend to eat too much?

Find out the local resources before you travel. If you are on an outdoor adventure trip, the guides will often be trained in advanced first aid as EMTs or paramedics. Do your  homework before you travel, and stash local contact info for a hospital or a recommended doctor or two with your other important documents.

This post originally appeared at Fathom.

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See Also:

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Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-to-do-if-you-get-sick-on-vacation-2011-10

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When customer service is a Twitter response

I READ this piece in Hotels magazine with interest. It?s an imagining of how a guest of the future might interact with his hotel during an overnight stay. Specifically it looks at how a modern hotel might utilise social media to improve the service it offers customers.

For example:

7 AM PST: You hop on a flight from LA to New York. Before take-off, you tweet, ?Headed to NYC. Looking 4ward to drink poolside @ThompsonLES.? When you land and turn your mobile on, you have a Twitter response from @ThompsonLES, which reads, ?We look forward to having you. Shall we reserve you a lounge chair??

And later on:

6 PM: When you arrive back in your room, you notice you have a message on your hotel iPad. You open it, and it takes you directly to the hotel's Facebook videos, and in particular, a video illustrating the hotel spa's offerings. Beneath the video is a ?click to reserve spa treatment? button. You do. And before setting the iPad down, you use the hotel's custom app to select and reserve a table at a recommended restaurant.

It?s all very clever technically, and doubtless responds to some guest needs, but I find this vision leaves me a bit cold. It?s a future where the acme of customer service comes in the shape of rapid response to guest tweets, and where as many interactions as possible between guest and hotel happen seamlessly in cyberspace. Heaven forfend that you should actually go and speak to the concierge, when you can see his recommendations on an iPad app.

If these digital offerings?which often amount to the hotel guessing your desires from the content of your tweets?are just extras provided on top of a regular, real-world suite of friendly customer services, then it's hard to object. But my fear is that a hotel that speaks to its guests by iPad, and encourages them to spend ever less time interacting in old-fashioned human ways, is a hotel that will lose its charm quite quickly. There's something of the love hotel about an establishment that works on the premise that guests want to avoid contact with staff wherever possible. And for stays of more than two hours, that's not right.

Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2011/10/hotels-future?fsrc=rss

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Should metro maps be touchscreens?

A FEW days ago, Popular Science's Dan Nosowitz got a chance to try out the first of New York's new interactive, touchscreen subway information screens. (It's in the Bowling Green station, near the southern tip of Manhattan.) He came away "pretty impressed" [emphasis added]:

I was actually pretty impressed with the Travel Station. It's very cleanly and clearly organized, with big buttons for Service Status, Elevators, MTA Maps, Key Destinations (the Canadians could have used this to go to Times Square), a Trip Planner, and Planned Work listed all along the bottom of the usable portion of the screen. The screen itself is pretty sharp, though the touchscreen is not incredibly sensitive. It's not a capacitive screen, like the iPad or a smartphone--that type of screen, which relies on the electricity given off by a human finger, is extremely expensive at that size.

I believe Cisco [which made the screens] went with a camera setup, in which cameras in the sides of the device bounce infrared light off anything that comes in contact with the screen (this is how Microsoft's Surface works). You can see in the video that I sometimes had to tap two or three times to get it to work, and that panning (as with the subway map) is a bit laggy. But overall it works pretty well, and as there's no cellphone service down in the MTA tunnels, it's a pretty good way to figure out what's going on in the subway system and how to get around.

More of the new subway information kiosks, which New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority is calling "On The Go Travel Stations," are rolling out over the next few weeks. One problem, of course, is that these are expensive devices (although the costs are supposedly going to be covered by advertising) and seem like they would be fairly vulnerable to vandalism and other mischief. With their web connections and 47-inch screens in high-traffic areas, they're going to be very attractive to hackers, for example. New York has a massive subway system. Will the MTA really be able to provide these touchscreens in all of the high-traffic stations? And even if the MTA can pull that off, are the new devices worth the initial investment and maintenance costs? Non-interactive displays might be lower-risk and more accessible for older folks.

Another issue is competition from cell phones. New York is rolling out cellular phone service throughout its subway system over the next few years. Given that most New Yorkers have a mobile device of some kind, it's hard to see what the audience for these touchscreens is going to be once cell phone service is available in all the stations. Many good subway apps are already available. The only obstacle to mass adoption in New York was the lack of service in the stations. Now that's changing. 

That said, the cell phone service deployment is already several years behind schedule, and users of CDMA-based phones (e.g., Sprint and Verizon customers) won't be able to get a signal?at least not during the initial roll-out. It could be years before every MTA station has any sort of cell service. In the meantime, these touchscreen maps?if deployed in large enough numbers?could provide some help to stranded or confused riders.

If you want to see the "On The Go Travel Station" in action, click through to Mr Nosowitz's post for a video demonstration.

Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2011/09/interactive-subway-maps?fsrc=rss

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To Japan on the very cheap

ANY "highly influential" bloggers out there who fancy free flights to Japan? The local tourism agency has announced plans to give away 10,000 return tickets in an effort to boost the number of foreign visitors. Japan's tourism industry has been badly hit by the strong yen and, particularly, the reaction to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in March. In the three months after the disaster the number of visitors dropped to half what they were in the same period in 2010.

"We are hoping to get highly influential blogger-types, and others who can spread the word that Japan is a safe place to visit,? said Kazuyoshi Sato of the tourism board, which intends to spend some 10% of its annual budget on the promotion. It will not find out till March 2012, though, whether the plan has been approved, and will only start taking applications in April. But this early naming of the proposal delivers a nice dollop of PR.

To apply for one of the free tickets you'll have to explain your travel plans and what you expect to get out of the visit.

Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2011/10/japanese-tourism?fsrc=rss

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A sunset before a sunrise

FOR 26 years before the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was fired up in 2009 at CERN, Europe's main particle-physics laboratory, near Geneva, the discipline was dominated by the Tevatron, the pride and joy of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, on the outskirts of Chicago (and, amusingly, next door to Geneva, Illinois). The machine was the first to smash particles at energies in excess of one trillion electron-volts?or 1TeV, whence its name. It nabbed plenty of subatomic exotica, including the top quark, a heavier cousin of the up quarks found in atomic nuclei, and made precise measurements of assorted fundamental physical parameters.

On September 30th, around 2pm central time, the venerable particle smasher will be put to rest (see article in this week's print edition). Some scientists get philosophical about its demise. ?Experiments are like lifeforms,? muses James Gates, a noted physicist and one of Barack Obama?s scientific advisers. ?They have lifetimes.? They are also rendered obsolete by newer, niftier kit; for all its might, the Tevatron pales in comparison to the LHC. And keeping it alive would have meant $30m-60m less for other promising projects at Fermilab. Pier Oddone, Fermilab?s Peruvian-born director general, wouldn't have it.

There will be no shortage of mourners. Roger Dixon, who heads Fermilab?s accelerator division, is planning a small wake after the last beam is aborted. Yet many of Fermilab?s boffins are not overcome with grief. For a start, the Tevatron detectors may not be recording any new collisions, but there are enough data to keep researchers at CDF and D-Zero busy for up to two years. They will be poring over petabytes of information for hints of, among other things, the elusive Higgs boson which is thought to be responsible for giving other particles their mass.

More importantly, a slew of new projects is in the offing. The laboratory?and, by the same token, the United States?may be throwing in the towel in the high-energy ring, admits Dr Oddone. But he believes it will soon be pushing what he dubs the "high-intensity frontier", focusing on what is emerging as the hottest thing in physics: mysterious particles called neutrinos. These tiny beasts continue to baffle physicists, most recently by appearing to travel faster than light.

Dr Oddone has spent the past few years planning for life after the Tevatron. This has allowed Fermilab to avoid major upheaval. There will be few lay-offs: a handful of veteran researchers have agreed to early retirement and a bunch of younger ones are moving to industry, which is only too keen to snap them up. One accelerator physicist who worked on the Tevatron has accepted a position operating tabletop accelerators used in cancer therapy at a hospital in California. For specialists like this, securing a well-paid job in the private sector is not hard. Companies are eager to tap their experience and know-how. Every time a budgetary squeeze is announced firms flood Fermilab with requests (unheeded) to place job offers in its internal communications channels.

read more

Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/09/future-fermilab?fsrc=rss

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