Davos Medical Tourism Bringing In Concerns About Corporate Work Environments
Davos, a European medical tourism destination, has long had a history of getting visitors in need of treatment. Recent travelers to the country, however, have led to a light being shined on corporate culture in the region.
A lot of Davos’s sanitariums and hospitals have since been converted to Alpine resorts, but they’re still getting patients, just ones suffering burnout, depression, and other mental and psychological issues.
Clinical Holistica Engiadina Chief Psychiatrist Michael Pfaff says that the specialty of Davos are its mountains, which help people get in touch with nature, something that helps immensely with helping people getting their mental stability back.
He says that there are a lot of people that work a lot, and get themselves burnt out, and these people all need a place to get rehab, a place where there’s good air and they’re free from stress.
The Clinical Holistica Engiadina, Pfaff’s clinic, is the only hospital operating in Switzerland that specializes in treating chronic stress patients. Distressingly, the 55-bed clinic regularly sees patients every year, even being booked for months at a time during particularly busy times.
Pfaff says that they get patients from as far as Germany, who come in with complains of body pain, anxiety, depression, and other kinds of psychomatic disorders, with many of them being middle-level managers, who he says deal with a lot in their offices. He notes that they expected to get a lot of top managers, but most of their patients are people from higher or middle management, showing that these people deal with the most pressure.
Pfaff reports that a lot of their patients come from financial and insurance companies, who pressure employees to deal with the long work hours and stressful environment with their hefty salary. He also noted that a lot of medical tourism travelers are from Zurich, Switzerland’s financial capital.
The World Health Organization classified burnout as a disease, and estimated that every five child or teenager will deal with burnout in their lifetime, alongside every fourth adult.
In Germany alone, the number of sick leaves attributed or related to mental illnesses has gone up by 200% since 1997. Switzerland, meanwhile, saw it go up by at least 50% in the past 7 years. Millennials have it worst, with a US study showing that 84% of millennials have dealt with burnout.
As a result, mental health is a major issue in the 2020 World Economic Forum, with WEF’s Peter Varnum saying that, while employers don’t need to turn into therapists, they do need to improve on their understanding of mental health.
