Recent Articles about Medical Tourism

This page will be frequently updated and contains stories from a variety of sources.  It’s a mix between media articles, patient and industry blogs and ‘scientific’ and medical journals.

Note: ‘Medical’ articles are often heavily weighted against medical tourism (but consider the source – as the majority are written by UK and USA physicians.)  However, many of these articles bring up important points to consider prior to considering medical travel, such as quality control , patient safety and objective measurements (and other issues that we have discussed here before).

For more on patient safety issues – see my sister site, Cartagena Surgery.

I have also omitted patient perspective/ ‘testimonial’ type stories for the most part – as we’ve discussed here and on Cartagena Surgery – first-person narratives are not helpful in that patients themselves often do not have all of the necessary components to provide recommendations.

Medical Tourism: the element of cost – Healthnews.com

Crime, drug wars threatens Mexico’s medical tourism – opinion article

A portable medical health record – for medical tourists and other travelers.  A paper talking about a new free application to assist travelers in maintaining portable health records, and how this may change the face of health care, and consumer expectations/ safety.

An excellent overview of the issues involved in medical tourism – including quality of care, cultural issues and informed consent.  (this is a British article and focuses primarily on medical tourism to Thailand, India).  However, all of the issues raised in this article are addressed in the Bogotá book.

A review of the literature surrounding ‘the patient experience’ of medical tourism’

A nice article talking about the availability and quality of medical tourism information available on the internet (something we’ve talked about many, many times.) Of course the name of the article, “Nip, Tuck and Click” does give a hint of the writers bias against medical tourism.