by Dr. Iain
Corness
One of the physicians at the Bangkok Pattaya Hospital,
working in the Health Promotion Department, is Dr. Prasan Stianrapapongs.
He is a long time resident of Pattaya, and is a doctor who has been very
fortunate and found his niche amongst the vast options that a medical
degree can give. He has been interested in promoting better health for
many years, and he is also a doctor who practises what he preaches.
He was born in Chachoengsao, the youngest of five
children. His father was a Chinese immigrant who worked hard as a rice
merchant to build up a successful business to support his family while his
mother stayed at home to raise the children.
The young Dr. Prasan was a good student, “I was
mostly in the top three at school,” so it was obvious that this was a
young lad who had an academic future. He finished his last two years of
schooling in Bangkok, in preparation for study at Chulalongkorn
University. He was 18 years of age and like most young boys of that age,
he was undecided about his career path. “I felt I should be in some sort
of science. I could have been an engineer or a scientist.” However, it
was his father who steered him towards medicine. “The youngest brother
of my grandfather was a doctor when we (the family) moved to Thailand from
China. My father would have liked to have been a doctor but he had no
chance. I was the first in the family here to have that chance.” Being a
dutiful son of Chinese stock, he paid attention to his father’s
dictates.
The die was cast, and he went to what is now Mahidol
University for two years and then followed four years of clinical studies
at Chulalongkorn University. Following his successful completion of his
medical degree he was elected to be a medical resident at the
Chulalongkorn University hospital, this being an honour only given to the
top students, and he joined the top medical brains of the year at
Chulalongkorn.
Following on from his internship he worked for two
years in a government hospital, but, since he did not want a life in the
government medical service, then left to set up his own private practice.
He did not choose Chachoengsao, but instead came to Pattaya, “a city
that was growing all the time.” Like all young doctors in their own
practices he treated everyone who walked through the door, but slowly he
began to see where his direction in medicine was heading. “I was getting
tired of treating the end results of people who ignored their own
health.”
He was also very interested in computers and even
started his own computer business which he also ran while encapsulating
his own ideas in preventive health maintenance. At the time, this was a
fairly ‘new’ concept, as medical doctors generally spent all their
time treating the sick, as opposed to attempting to advise people so that
they could stay well. He began to practice preventive health measures
himself, looking at nutrition and exercise. This involved him in
researching the reasons for “health” as opposed to looking at factors
causing “disease”.
You only have to look at Dr. Prasan today and you can
see that he is a very fit mid-fifties. Every day he has his own exercise
programme that he follows and counsels that it is the regularity of the
exercise that is most important, not how much you do at any one time.
His study in preventive health covered not only what is
being done today, but also took him back to his Chinese roots and he found
that the Chinese had written about preventive medicine thousands of years
ago, particularly in relation to sexual health. Further studies led him to
the concept of intercourse being an aerobic form of exercise, but
ejaculation (in the male) was an event that took energy away. In the over
60’s group, this meant that while following the paths of pleasure, they
were making it such that they had less energy to follow this path the next
day! The old writings showed there was a way around this problem, and Dr.
Prasan uses this method to educate and return vitality to his older
patients.
Now very comfortable in the promotion of good health,
he applies the principles of nutrition and exercise to his patients as the
first line of attack. It is only when these regimes cannot (or will not)
be carried out by the patients that he will resort to pharmaceutical
standby’s, skilfully melding the old oriental medicine concepts with the
newer western medicine methodology.
He is married, not to a nurse as are so many of his
colleagues, but to a woman who was an education graduate. She also
embraces the healthy lifestyle concept put forward by her husband Dr.
Prasan, “She likes exercise even more than me,” he said. They have two
daughters, one with a Masters Degree in Arts, while the younger is an
interior designer. I asked him if he were disappointed that neither of his
children followed him into medicine. “Absolutely not,” was his reply.
“I am happy to see my children follow their own natural abilities,”
citing the fact that his interior designer daughter was drawing pictures
before she could write.
His hobbies include exercise (surprise) and he used to
play tennis. He enjoys a game of bridge, likes photography and is still
interested in computers, even though he no longer runs the computer
business.
I asked Dr. Prasan whether he had any ambitions
unfulfilled and he thought about it for a while, and replied, “Doing
this new job (at the Bangkok Pattaya Hospital) is what I want. I don’t
like treating the end results. I like to help people to take care of
themselves. I really enjoy this (preventive health) work.”
Dr. Prasan is very obviously in harmony with himself and his
surroundings - and it shows.
