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Medical Examinations In the CR-1 and IR-1 Marriage Visa Context

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing medical examinations; specifically in the context of the CR-1 or the IR-1 Immigrant Spouse Visa. 

Why am I bringing this up? Well there are a number of questions people have with respect to when and where and how and why medical exams have to be undertaken? 

The “why” is fairly simple.  Pursuant to US Law, Consular Officers need to ascertain whether or not someone has been vaccinated for certain illnesses and does not pose a threat of spreading certain types of communicable diseases, hence the reason that you need to go ahead and get a medical exam.  

When should one undertake the medical exam?  Well I like to tell people it's not something that immediately needs to be done.  You can wait a while because these things can go stale in the sense that if you get one done and too much time has elapsed between having it done and the actual visa interview, there can be problems getting the Visa issued because they may want to see another medical exam that is issued more closely to the interview date or to the date of the Visa's issuance. In fact, in a 221g context, there are situations where you might have to have the medical examination redone as Administrative Processing will take up enough time as it go ahead and eat away at the validity of the underlying medical exam.

Who can go ahead and do this? Well it is basically a limited subset of people who can go ahead and undertake a medical exam. They are called Civil Surgeons. They are certified by the US mission in Thailand to undertake these exams and provide such exams as evidence in a US Visa context. The thing to take away from that is there are only a certain number of them which goes to the where.  

There are only a couple places in Bangkok and one place up in Chiang Mai that can undertake the medical examination and for this reason it is a good idea to ascertain where exactly that needs to be done before going ahead and proceeding. In most cases, we double-check every couple of months just to make sure the same people in the same institutions are in fact certified to provide those kinds of exams and go ahead and keep using, usually mostly the same facilities.  That being said, mostly with they are checking for is vaccination history as well as the history of communicable diseases. As stated, HIV and tuberculosis can be major issues with respect to Medical exams and the US visa process.  I have done some other videos on this channel discussing HIV and tuberculosis in more detail but the thing to take away from this video is a medical exam is necessary. It is a good idea to do it as close to the interview as possible in order to forestall having to pay for more than one and there's only certain places that can be done.  

So there are some restrictions with respect the scope of action if you will with respect to the medical exam but once it is complete it just makes up one more piece of evidence associated with the application for an IR-1 or a CR-1 Visa.