Terms
Updated:
These terms cover this website and the video consultations booked through it. Please read them before you book. If you do not accept them, do not book a call.
Who you are dealing with
This website is operated by Bamboo Medical Services Co., Ltd., 31 Soi 13, Sirimangkalajarn Road, Suthep, Mueang Chiang Mai, Chiang Mai 50200, Thailand, registered in Thailand under number 0505564007536. Where these terms say "we", that is who they mean.
We are not a medical practice and we do not provide medical care. Your consultation is given by a doctor registered with the Medical Council of Thailand. That doctor is responsible for the advice they give you and for any prescription they write. We are responsible for the website, the booking and the payment.
The consultation is provided through D&D Clinic (ดีแอนด์ดี คลินิกเวชกรรม), a clinic licensed under Thailand's Medical Facility Act and permitted to provide telemedicine, licence number 13101003864, at 2/143 Soi Rangsit-Nakhon Nayok 34/1, Prachathipat, Thanyaburi, Pathum Thani 12130. Its acting director, the doctor responsible in law for running it, is Dr. Matinun Arpornsuwan.
Thai law requires a consultation like this to be delivered through a licensed facility rather than by a website, and that is the arrangement your call takes place under. The licence is a public record, and you can read it at http://hssc.hss.moph.go.th/medicalViewSp19.php?itemId=247563.
What you are booking
A video consultation with a licensed doctor, of up to 15 minutes, for US$30.
You choose a time, you pay, and a link arrives by email. The call opens in your browser. There is no app, no account and no subscription.
How a booking works, step by step
From the moment you start the form to the moment the call is over:
You pick a time on the booking page and tell us your name, your email address, the country you will be in, your age, your gender and what you would like to talk about.
You accept the terms, the privacy notice and the refund policy, and submit the form. That holds the time for you. It is not a booking yet and you have paid nothing.
You are taken to the payment page and pay by card. Your card details go to our payment provider Payso and never to us.
When the payment clears, the booking is confirmed and a confirmation email is sent to you straight away. It gives the date, the time in your own time zone, how long the call is and your booking reference.
If you want to, you can now send your doctor anything useful — test results, a referral letter, a list of your medicines, a photograph. That is optional, and nobody reads it before the call.
The link to the call reaches you by email before your appointment.
Shortly before the call, both you and your doctor are reminded by email. That email is where your doctor is named.
At the time you booked, you open the link and your doctor joins. The call lasts up to 15 minutes.
Afterwards you get a written summary. In Thailand, and only if your doctor judges it appropriate, a prescription, delivery of the medicine and a medical certificate can follow.
What you are buying is delivered on the call itself. Nothing is posted to you and there is nothing to collect.
Sending your doctor documents
Once your booking is confirmed you can send your doctor documents — test results, a referral letter, a list of the medicines you take, a photograph of what is worrying you. It is optional and the call goes ahead either way. We can take up to 5 files of up to 10 MB each, in whatever format your clinic gave you, and you can remove anything you have sent up until the call. The only thing we turn away is a program or a script.
Nobody reads what you send before the call. Your doctor looks at it when they prepare for your appointment, usually shortly beforehand. It is not a way to ask a question, nobody is watching it arrive, and sending something does not start your treatment or create any relationship with a doctor before the call takes place. If something gets worse while you are waiting, do not wait for the call.
Keep your own copy of anything you send. It is not your medical record and we do not keep it as one — it is erased along with what you wrote about your health, 30 days after the call. The privacy notice gives the full account of who can open it and what happens to it.
What this is not
This is not an emergency service. If you think you may be having a medical emergency, like chest pain, trouble breathing, heavy bleeding, signs of a stroke, or thoughts of harming yourself, stop reading and call your local emergency number.
It is not a substitute for being examined. A doctor on a video call cannot take your blood pressure, listen to your chest, feel where it hurts or send you for a test. Some problems cannot be assessed this way, and your doctor will tell you when yours is one of them.
It does not make us your regular doctor. Each call stands on its own.
Who can book
You must be 18 or over, and the call must be for you. You cannot book on behalf of somebody else.
Your doctor may ask you to confirm who you are before they advise you, and may decline to prescribe if they cannot establish your identity.
What a call can produce
What a consultation can do depends on where you are, because a doctor's licence does.
In Thailand, if your doctor judges it appropriate, they can write a prescription, have the medicine delivered to you (in Bangkok and many other areas) and issue a medical certificate for your employer. The medicine itself is not part of what you pay us. You pay the clinic or the pharmacy for the medicine and for delivering it, and they will tell you what it costs before anything is sent.
Everywhere else, our doctors are not licensed to prescribe, to arrange medicine or to issue a medical certificate. You get the same conversation, an opinion on whether what you describe needs care today and what kind, your questions answered, and a written summary you can take to a doctor or a pharmacy where you are.
You are paying for a doctor's time and opinion. You are not paying for a diagnosis, a treatment, a prescription, a medical certificate or any particular outcome. None of those is guaranteed anywhere. A doctor who decides that prescribing would not be right, or that they cannot honestly certify you unfit for work, will say so, and that is a consultation that happened.
Whether medicine can be delivered to you depends on where in Thailand you are. Bangkok is well covered and much of the rest of the country is too, but not all of it, and your doctor will tell you if yours is somewhere that is not.
Our doctors do not prescribe controlled substances.
A doctor can decline or end a call
Your doctor may stop a consultation if they judge that your problem cannot be handled safely by video, that you need to be seen in person or urgently, or that the call cannot go ahead safely, for example if you are somewhere you could be overheard and have not agreed to that. They may also end a call if you are abusive to them, and a call ended for that reason is not refundable.
If your doctor ends the call before giving you any opinion at all (you are somewhere you cannot speak freely, or the connection will not carry it) you get your money back. If they listen, weigh it up and tell you that this needs examining in person, you have had the consultation and it is not refunded. That is often the most useful thing a call can produce, and it is what you paid a doctor to be able to say.
Booking, paying and confirming
Your appointment does not exist until the payment clears. Submitting the form holds a time for you and nothing more. When the payment goes through, the booking is confirmed and the link is sent.
Prices are in US dollars, and the price you see is the price you pay: nothing is added at the end, and any tax that applies is already included. The payment is taken for us by Payso, and we never see your card details.
Moving, cancelling and missing a call
You can move or cancel a booking at no charge up to 24 hours before it starts. Simply reply to your confirmation email and we will do it. Inside those 24 hours the fee is not refundable: your doctor has held that time around another job, and it is too late for us to offer it to anybody else.
If you are late, your doctor waits 5 minutes and then the appointment counts as having happened, and is not refunded. Please open your link a few minutes early and check that your camera and microphone work. If something at our end is what stopped you joining, please let us know via email.
If your connection drops during the call, open the same link again and you rejoin. Your doctor stays for the rest of your slot. If the call cannot be completed at all and that was not something you could have helped, we will rebook you at no charge, or refund you if you would rather not.
The refund that applies in each case is on the Refunds page.
If we move or cancel it
Sometimes we have to. A doctor falls ill, or the service closes for a public holiday. If that happens we will tell you as soon as we know and offer you another time, and if none of them suits you, you get all of your money back. You will not be left to find out at the appointment.
If you are in the EU or the UK
You have a legal right to cancel a service bought online within 14 days. It is better than our own rule, so it is the one that applies to you: cancel within 14 days of booking and before the call has taken place, and you get all of your money back, whatever the 24 hours above says. You do not have to give a reason. Email realdoc@bamboo.co.th.
Once the call has happened, that right is gone, and this is the part worth reading twice. By picking a time and accepting these terms you are asking us to go ahead on that date even though it falls inside the 14 days, and agreeing that you lose the right to cancel once the consultation has taken place. That is what the tick box on the booking form is for.
If no doctor joins
If nobody joins your call, you get all of your money back.
What we need from you
Tell the truth. Your doctor only knows what you tell them, and a consultation built on something inaccurate can be worse than no consultation.
Be somewhere private enough to talk, with a connection good enough for video.
Do not record the call.
Records
The call itself is not recorded. No audio or video of your consultation is kept by us, by the clinic or by the service that carries the call. Your doctor's written notes are the record, which is why we also ask you not to record it.
Your doctor keeps a clinical record of the consultation, as they are required to. We keep the booking. What we hold and for how long is in the Privacy notice.
Complaints
Email realdoc@bamboo.co.th and we will answer.
A complaint about clinical care is ultimately a matter for the Medical Council of Thailand, with whom every doctor here is registered. Each doctor's registration number is published on this site so that you can check it yourself.
What we are responsible for
We are responsible for running this website, for taking your booking and for having a doctor on the call at the time you booked. Where we fail at that, we refund you, and the Refunds page says when that happens without your having to ask.
Your doctor and the clinic are responsible for the medical side: the advice you are given, anything prescribed, and the clinical record of the call. We cannot take that responsibility on and we do not try to sign it away on their behalf. Every doctor here is registered with the Medical Council of Thailand and answerable to it.
We do not exclude or limit our liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law where you live does not permit to be excluded. Nothing in these terms removes a right you have as a consumer.
Beyond that, and as far as the law where you live allows, what we are liable for is limited to what you paid for the call. We are not liable for losses that follow on from it indirectly: time off work, travel, something else you missed, or lost earnings.
We also cannot promise that the website or the call will be uninterrupted. If a connection fails at our end, the Refunds page says what we do about it.
Changes
We may change these terms. The date at the top is when they last changed, and the terms that apply to your booking are the ones published when you made it.
Which law applies
These terms are governed by Thai law, and a dispute we cannot settle between us goes to the courts of Thailand.
That is not the whole story, and we would rather say so than let you find out. If you live in the European Union or the United Kingdom, you keep the consumer protection your own country gives you whatever a contract says, including the right to bring a claim where you live. We are not trying to take that away.
Before any of that, email realdoc@bamboo.co.th. Almost everything turns out to be a misunderstanding that an email settles.