Review: RAKxa Wellness & Medical Retreat, Thailand spa review

Set the scene

Bangkok – visible on the skyline – is only 50 minutes away by car, but the Thai capital feels half a world away from this groundbreaking East-meets-West retreat. Spread around a lake and along a stretch of the Chao Phraya river, and with the only sounds often just birdsong and the hiss of water sprinklers, RAKxa is within the city’s green lung, of the conservation-area island of Bang Krachao. Inside the art-filled entrance pavilion, a ceremonial welcome sets seven antique singing bowls sending out ripples of sound as new guests take in the view across the water. Then it’s into a golf buggy to one’s villa, via lanes dense with young casuarina and banana trees, jungly palms, and white-blossomed frangipani.

About an hour after arrival – despite the serene atmosphere, little time is wasted here – comes the first appointment, with health and wellness advisor, Aum. A former nurse (ex-Chiva-Som, like about a third of the wellness staff here), she encourages the idea of “meditation not medication”. Based on the detailed health questionnaire sent out pre-stay, she will have prepared a packed treatment schedule for you. And so starts a stay characterised by a sense of quiet dedication and during which the Thai staff – exquisitely groomed, with glossy skin, lustrous hair and a smiley demeanour – seem to keep abreast of whatever health issue, large or small, each guest wants to tackle.

This particular week, guests include two young Japanese couples, a solo British expat from Dubai, and a multi-generational Thai group headed by a jaunty grandfather and immaculately coiffed grandmother. He’s here to see if a wellness approach can sort out his long-standing digestive problems, given a medical approach has failed.

What’s the backstory?

A partnership between MK Real Estate, Minor Hotels and the VitaLife Scientific Wellness chain, an offshoot of Bangkok’s Bumrungrad International hospital, RAKxa opened in December 2020. Originally, it was planned as a clinic with accommodation. That changed abruptly, however, five years ago, when at 47, CEO Dusadee Tancharoen was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

“What really shocked me,” she says, “was, although I’d been only off and on into healthy living, check-up blood tests had always come back ‘within range’. I suddenly realised the necessity – for all of us – of focussing on what good health really involves.” Taking a deep dive, post-treatment, into complementary medicine, she visited top medi-spas around the world – “to see what was happening in the wellness industry” – and thought she saw a gap in the market. “I loved them all,” she explains. “But most focussed mainly on either the medical or the holistic. So we decided RAKxa should combine both – and do everything. After all, we are Thai! We have 5,000 year old traditions of Asian medicine to call on.”

What’s the wellness concept?

It’s all about integrative medicine here. Medical doctors are onsite daily at the VitaLife clinic. Yards away, doctors of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Ayurveda, and Traditional Thai Medicine (TTM) work alongside physiotherapists and barefoot holistic TCM, Ayurveda TTM and practitioners.

What are the signature treatments?

In the VitaLife clinic, the more medicinal treatments and analysis available include hormone and micronutrient tests, IV vitamin drips, sessions in hyperbaric oxygen and cryotherapy chambers, heavy metal chelation, DNA analysis, live blood analysis, and more. It’s also possible to get botox and fillers here.

In the wellness areas – all wood, stone, glass, rattan and ceramics – cupping to colonics, energy healing to electrostimulation, acupuncture to moxibustion to reflexology.  Post-chemo cancer patients are also gently looked after.

Which therapist should I book?

Physiotherapist Mew offers biomechanic gait analysis before your massage, to see what your body needs most. Meen is the go-to therapist for an Angel Stone facial and head massage, while the melodiously voiced Ayurvedic Dr Dinesh Singh offers meditation. Uniquely, RAKxa focusses on other Traditional Thai Medicine (TTM) modalities besides Thai massage. Nok’s TTM treatment with oil will massage you into a totally relaxed state, and Dr Chernkwan, taught by a descendent of a doctor to King Rama II, gives one of the most powerful deep-tissue massages (with pressure-point work from scalp to soles, much of it performed while you lie on your side) that I’ve experienced in 30-plus years of visiting spas.

What makes it different?

“We don’t cure; we offer preventive care. Thailand is unusual because everyone grows up using herbal remedies, so the mainstream medical doctors genuinely understand the TCM, Ayurvedic and TTM doctors, and appreciate how they can all work together,” says the CEO Artirat Charukitpipat. That exceptional Thai service adds to the feeling of wellbeing permeating RAKxa.

What else do they offer?

Local farmers and the resort’s own organic farm supply the restaurant, which serves non-inflammatory Mediterranean and Thai dishes, exquisitely presented. 

Every villa is supplied with bikes, while optional daily activities include aqua aerobic boxing, fascia release, active suspension, fitball, yoga, Pilates Reformer and cooking. The riverside tea lounge offers fresh coconut juice and 60 different teas, served with tiny canapes and crunchy little coconut and almond biscuits (you find only water and probiotics in the mini-bars.)

Where do you stay?

There are two three-bedroom residences, but most accommodation is in roomy one-bedroom villas, well screened by dense vegetation. Of the 60, 20 are lakeside, with a pool. Star attractions are the most glamorously, cutting-edge loos, excitingly lit from within. These disco loos are also, as you discover at night, extremely practical.

Anything else to mention?

It’s 6.30am. There’s a rustling in the undergrowth in my waterfront garden. Slowly, a four-foot-long lizard with darting tongue appears. Waddling onto the grass, it looks around vaguely, then slides into the lake, soon followed by another. ‘Big lizards. Live in lake but sometimes wander around. Very shy,’ says a waitress at breakfast. That’s a relief. It also explains the guarded expressions when a guest asks brightly, ‘Can we swim in the lake?’

Final word

During lockdown, my feet began permanently tingling, and broken capillaries appeared around my ankles. ‘Natural sign of ageing,’ said a GP. ‘Blocked chi from sitting too much,’ said RAKxa’s wellness advisor. After days of exercise, circulation-boosting massages and yoga, and foot-roller work, the tingling has almost disappeared. I’m thrilled.

Healing Holidays (healingholidays.com/condenast; 020 7843 3592) can arrange a 3-night Sense of RAKxa programme from £2,689 per person sharing, including transfers, full board accommodation and inclusions of the programme.