Medical Tourism in Developing Countries

Introduction to Medical Tourism ● 5who revealed remedies to them in their dreams. Nineteenth-century Britishtravelers sought out warm and dry climates to treat their lung and boneailments. Over the ages and across the continents, people went to thermaland mineral waters and warm dry climates to improve their health. Rosssaid it aptly: “Health tourism is a concept as ancient as prehistory and asup-to-date as tomorrow.” 29 Yet, it was first designated as a commercialactivity by the International Union of Travel Officials only in 1973. 30Moreover, medical tourism is also not new insofar as many Western countrieshave a history of treating foreigners. The UK, for example, hasexported health services since its colonial days, and presently one-fifth ofhospital beds in London are occupied by foreigners. 31 The United Statesalso attracts international patients. In 1997, the four Mayo Clinics got10,000 patients from abroad, and Johns Hopkins increased foreign patientsfrom 600 to 7,200 in just two years. 32 What is different in the twenty-firstcentury is that tourists are traveling farther away, to poorer countries, andfor medical care that is invasive and high tech. In other words, the natureand prevalence of the travel has changed, but the goal of the travel has not.According to Narsinha Reddy, what has changed is that the medical tourismphenomenon now has a name and a buzz. 33 But that is not all. What hasalso changed is that the economic impact for both destination and sendingcountries has become much larger than in the past.Second, over the last decade or so, as globalization spread to ever morecorners of the globe, the concept (and reality) of outsourcing has proliferatedworldwide as an increasing number of businesses are shifting part oftheir production process overseas. Previously limited to manufacturing,outsourcing now includes services whose range is growing daily. For example,American law firms are hiring Indian attorneys to do simple legal work andeven hiring doctors to provide medical expert witness services in real time. 34American high school students work with online math tutors thousands ofmiles away. 35 Outsourcing is so prevalent that one-third of American softwareengineers are expected to lose their jobs to it in the next six years. 36In the early twenty-first century, few multinationals have not engaged inoutsourcing: over 125 Fortune 500 firms have R&D bases in India. 37 Inthe medical sector, developing countries (with India at the helm) are movinginto medical outsourcing, according to which subcontractors provideservices to overburdened Western medical systems (for example, Americanhospitals e-mail x-rays to India for reading). The Western medical sector isdrawn to developing countries that supply high-quality services whose rangeis very broad, including finance, biotech, information techno logy, et cetera.To the extent that businesses are profiting from the new possibilities offeredby the global economy, consumers are not far behind. They have been