Caviar for patients recovering from a blood test, psychoanalysis at 10,000 dollars per hour: nothing is too much for ailing billionaires at the Neo Vita clinic in Moscow’s swishest suburb.

For the clinic’s founder, Artyom Tolokonin, ensuring good health for the capital’s super-rich inhabitants is even better for his pocket book.

The 33-year-old psychoanalyst says that about a dozen residents of the Rublyovka neighbourhood — dubbed Moscow’s Beverly Hills — are paying for year-round treatments costing as much as a million dollars (636,000 euros) a time. […]

Visitors pass a police post and surveillance cameras, before having their street shoes clad in clean overshoes, and entering a hallway gently illuminated by liquid-like jets of light.

Multiple flat TV screens broadcast images of the countryside along to specially composed anti-stress music.

Everything at Neo Vita is done to pamper not only the bodies, but the egos and reputations of patients. Examination room doors remain unmarked “so as not to advertise our clients’ problems,” as Tolokonin explained.

Clients even more keen on privacy can use a discreet side door. One, a well known businessman, according to Tolokonin, has even paid 200,000 dollars (127,000 euros) to reserve the entire place to himself when he visited his doctor.

“People able to pay 10,000 dollars (6,360 euros) for an hour of psychoanalysis are a very specific sort,” said Tolokonin, who has practised in the Rublyovka neighbourhood for six years. […]

However, Natalya, […] said she and her husband, “who works in the gas sector,” visit Neo Vita every week. “Basically we pay a little less than 10,000 dollars (6,360 euros) an hour,” she said. “But health is more valuable than money.” [..]

Tolokonin said the extraordinary prices were justified.”The rich go to London for a dentist or a popular dietician in Switzerland, but their soul can only be healed here.”

Russian billionaires have the same problems as their counterparts elsewhere — fatigue, insomnia, substance abuse, impotence — but “Western psychoanalysts don’t know the Russian mentality,” Tolokonin said.[..]

Via AFP