Having been a journalist for 25 years and specialised in hotel business, Maria Pütz-Willems travelled the world for 16 years as a freelance journalist for leading hotel and tourism publications. Always with a certain feeling for trends and ideas and staying in permanent contact with international dialogue partners. In 2005, she launched the online magazine www.hospitaliyInside.com, a bilingual network for international hotel business.
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Hotel guests in medical hands
"Medical Wellness", what exactly is that? A term racing through the media, and the only thing that is clear is the following: two branches that have never had anything in common are currently moving closer together. Medicine and wellness? Is there a possibility of joining these two fields? At least, this is what the new word creation suggests. In any case, Medical Wellness is not what various institutions’ general definitions call it. In Germany alone, there are five different explanations floating around on the market, but none of them manages to use five sentences to explain the phenomenon. Courageous investors and hotel owners seem to practice the "learning by doing" method. The only hard fact that one can filter out of public discussions and media reports is that Medical Wellness is „bloodless“ and aimed at the „not acutely ill“, at guests rather than at patients. Furthermore, Medical Wellness can be realised in every health-oriented wellness hotel under the lead of doctors and professionals.
Medical Wellness does not use expensive devices and an equipment-based medicine. The goal is to make guests adopt a healthier attitude in order to live a longer, happier and more powerful life. The difference to simple wellness offers is the fact that the hotel guest is actually cared for by a doctor who tries to obtain a rise in the patient’s physical and mental performance by means of examinations and personal coaching. The feelgood factor is thus reached through the relaxing hotel atmosphere where this analysis takes place.
As we know today, the way a patient feels has a great psychological importance during a his or her process of recovery and regeneration. Nowadays, hotel owners are expected to offer serious Medical Wellness. Guests are more and more following the trend of having their health status checked during a week of vacation, freed from their stressy everyday life and with the chance of concentrating only on themselves for a while. Hotel owners are therefore asked to find professional doctors who are willing to supply their services in order to help build this new concept on a well-founded basis. Ideal for such a purpose would be (former) doctors of "orthodox medicine" with an interest in natural healing and alternative medicine. Some hotels have already created various fields in their range of "Medical" offers, offering general practitioners, cardiologists, dermatologists and dentists as well preventive medicine. Nevertheless, travellers and hotel guests will have to obtain a lot of information when looking for their perfect Medical Wellness holidays, as there is no limit to time and effort when it comes to body regeneration programs that help to "save one’s skin".
Maria Pütz-Willems
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