Stories, published with permission — including the ones that don't flatter us.

Yusuf H. brought his mother, 71, from Amman for bilateral knee replacement. Two separate trips would have cost roughly $12,400 and meant two recoveries; a single admission cost $9,800 and one.

The surgeon was candid that bilateral is harder on an older patient, and made the decision conditional on her cardiac workup. It cleared. She walked, with a frame, on day two.

What Yusuf writes about is not the surgery. It is that the Arabic interpreter attended every ward round rather than just admission, so his mother heard her own prognosis from her own doctor, in her own language.

"I did not have to translate my mother's health to her. She is 71. She has earned the right to be spoken to directly."

A facilitator is paid when a patient is admitted. That is the uncomfortable structural fact of this industry, and no amount of warm copy about "patient-first values" changes it. So it is worth being specific about what we do when the incentive points the wrong way.

In April a family flew in from Almaty with a 9-year-old and a recommendation for posterior fossa decompression. Both of our reviewing neurosurgeons read the imaging as a borderline radiological finding in a child with no progressive symptoms. Their advice was the same: re-scan in six months, operate only if it changes.

We could have booked the surgery. The family had travelled, they were frightened, and they would have consented. Instead we paid for their consultation, told them to go home, and wrote to their paediatrician in Almaty explaining why.

He was re-scanned in October. Nothing had changed. He is fine, and we made nothing. We publish this not because it is noble but because it is the only credible way to answer the question every patient is really asking: what happens when telling me the truth costs you money?

Rafiq's autologous bone marrow transplant took eleven weeks in India. Six of those were neutropenic isolation and outpatient monitoring — medically necessary, and profoundly boring.

His account is mostly about that middle period: the serviced apartment with a kitchen, his wife learning to cook for a neutropenic diet, the WhatsApp group with two other Bangladeshi families going through the same thing on the same floor.

We include it because prospective patients consistently underestimate this part. The clinical plan is eleven weeks. The human plan has to be eleven weeks too.

Five questions that will tell you more about a quote than the number at the bottom of it:

• Which implant, by manufacturer and model? "Imported implant" is not an answer.
• How many ICU days are included, and what does day four cost?
• Is the pre-operative workup inside or outside the package?
• Which room category is this priced at? Suites quietly double a bill.
• Who signed it? A quote without a hospital signature is a marketing document.

Send us any quote, from anyone, and we will answer these five for you. We do it for quotes from our competitors too — it is the single most useful free thing we can offer.