Medical tourism

Medical tourism is the act of traveling to other countries to obtain medical, dental, and surgical care. A combination of many factors has lead to the recent increase in popularity of medical tourism: exorbitant costs of healthcare in industrialized nations, ease and affordability of international travel, favorable currency exchange rates in the global economy, rapidly improving technology and standards of care in many countries of the world.

Medical tourists are generally residents of the industrialized nations of the world, the countries they travel are typically the less developed ones with lower cost of high quality medical care (often specifically targeted at medical tourists), sometimes due to favorable currency exchange ratios. Currently, many of the procedures accessed are considered "elective procedures," such as cosmetic surgery. Because elective procedures are rarely covered through health insurance plans, there may be greater incentive to find such care at lower costs.

Moreover, health care insurance companies within industrialized nations have begun considering medical tourism as a potential cost-saving measure, and have discussed providing round trip airfare and tourist excursions as "consumer incentives" to help encourage this kind of travel. Medical tourism holds the promise of reducing health care costs for individuals, companies, and governments, as the latter will likely offer discounts and/or rebates to their employees and consitutents to prompt them to chose the medical tourism option and, in turn, reduce the insurer's and self-insurer's growing costs of providing quality health care.

There are also many companies that can help arrange patients' surgeries, travel arrangements and tours. Many of these companies partner with specific hospitals, thereby arranging a cheaper price for their patients than one could arrange on their own through the hospital directly.

More and more people from all over the world are traveling to other countries not only as tourists who come for sightseeing and shopping but also to get medical, dental, and surgical services from hospitals and other health destinations. Medical tourism is a rapidly growing industry with countries like Mexico, Brazil, Argentina. Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Peru, Singapore , Hungary, India, Israel, Jordan, Lithuania, Malaysia, South Africa, Thailand and the Philippines actively promoting it. However, in places like the US, where most have insurance and access to quality health care, most view Medical Tourism as risky because of lack of information, confusion and understanding.

A few academics, including prominent anthropologists Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Lawrence Cohen of the University of California at Berkeley, have begun to address this phenomenon, most notably in the 2002 edited volume Commodifying Bodies (Edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loïc Wacquant). Most websites are designed to address travel to one facility, or country, or the use of one service which agregates many of them. However, a few sources are dedicated to educating, in a neutral and unbiased way, its benefits and seek to enable discussion of the issues associated with medical tourism. Only through the honest sharing of different patient experiences will the risks and benefits of Medical Tourism be fully understood, and idea of Medical Tourism more widely accepted by patients in the US and elsewhere, where its adoption has been relatively slow.

External links

• Medical Tourism Online Community Discussion Forum