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Thanks for visiting the Temporary Travel Office's Blog. Here you can read news about our projects and discussions about critical tourism practices and other developments related to travel and tourism.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Medical Tourism

[image from the CBC]
I recently came across a blog devoted to medical tourism, the practice of traveling to other location for medical care. There has been some media coverage of the recent trend of people in the US traveling to India and Thailand, for example, for special treatments and lower surgical costs.
A friend of the Travel Office (Ricardo Miranda-Zuniga) did an excellent project about US residents visiting dentists on the Mexican side of the border.
As the Wikipedia entry notes, however, medical tourism is not quite a new idea (they mention spa towns, and even an ancient Greek example). The ongoing history of women having to travel across state lines in order to receive an abortion could be a fairly recent example that also reveals that travel for medical purposes is not "simply" a tourist affair - especially since recent legislation makes this travel even more complicated and dangerous for many in the US. The Dutch-based Women on Waves provides a more international response to such juridical regulation of women's bodies.
With the US medical-insurance-nutrition industry being what it is, it's not surprising that lots of its citizens are touring to neighboring countries, both physically and virtually, for lower cost meds.
On another blog, and quite some time ago now, I posted before about the global trade in genetic material and what I called "fertility tourism," which would also include the geographic transfer of genetic material (human and non-human) from legally under-represented populations into the intellectual property banks of US and European biotech firms - what has been aptly called "biopiracy".
So where do all these different instances of mobility and health intersect? Access is probably a good place to start... but that's for another day.

posted by ryan griffis # 1:43 AM

Comments:

You may also be interested in MedTripInfo www.medtripinfo.com, dedicated to providing information about medical tourism.

David E. Williams
CEO MedTripInfo
# posted by dwilliams : July 25, 2007 4:56 PM

http://www.fly2doc.com is an interesting site about medical tourism to Portugal and Spain.
# posted by K : December 3, 2007 8:33 AM

Medical Tourism
# posted by K : December 3, 2007 8:34 AM

Has Anyone Actually Tried Medical Tourism? We've read about it, heard about it, and even talked about it. But how many of us know someone who has gone on a health vacation to India? Anyone ever come back from Thailand with a new hip? Is there any forum where real people can discuss real medical tourism issues - http://www.healthmedicaltourism.org
# posted by Arige Prakash : March 3, 2008 12:45 AM

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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Medical Tourism

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