Three Academics' Perspective on Medical Tourism: Reflections on a Trip to Southern India

To date, medical tourism has gone relatively unnoticed by academic researchers when compared to other global health services practices such as health worker migration. Amongst the flurry of business briefings, industry reports and news media coverage that have accompanied the rapid growth of the industry over the past decade, only a handful of accounts from an academic perspective exist. Moreover, very few of these academic accounts are from researchers who have personally visited medical tourism facilities. In an effort to address this gap a research team, based at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, has started to examine medical tourism from the combined perspectives of bioethics, health geography and tourism studies.