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The Japanese are the world’s most prodigious consumers of health care. The average Japanese visits a doctor about 14.5 times per year — three times as often as the U.S. average, and twice as often as any nation in Europe…The Japanese love medical technology; they get twice as many CAT scans per capita as Americans do and three times as many MRI scans. Japan has twice as many hospital beds per capita as the United States, and people use them. The average hospital stay in Japan is thirty-six nights, compared to six nights in the United States…Japan lags, though, in terms of invasive surgery; Japanese patients are much less apt than Americans to have operations such as arthroplasty, transplant, or heart bypass. This is partly economics — since the fees for surgery are low, doctors don’t recommend it as often — and partly cultural. As a rule, Japanese doctors and patients prefer drugs to cutting the body. On a per-capita basis, the Japanese take about twice as many prescription drugs as Americans do.
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