“Fertility tourism” is a journalistic eye‐catcher focusing on the phenomenon of patients who search for a reproductive treatment in another country in order to circumvent laws, access restrictions, ...or waiting lists in their home country. In Europe, the reasons why people seek reproductive treatments outside their national boundaries are quite diverse, in part because regulations differ so much among countries. Beginning with four examples of people who crossed borders for an in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment with gamete donation, this article provides some insight into these transnational circumvention practices based on material from ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in Spain, Denmark, and the Czech Republic. In all three countries, gamete donation is made strictly anonymous. Clinical practices such as egg donor recruitment and phenotypical matching between donors and recipients serve to naturalize the substitution of gametes and to install social legitimacy through resemblance markers with the prospective child. In comparison to other areas of medical tourism, which are subjects of debate as a consequence of neoliberal health politics and international medical competition, mobility in the area of reproductive technologies is deeply intertwined with new forms of doing kinship. For prospective parents, it holds a promise of generating offspring who could pass as biogenetically conceived children. Therefore, IVF with gamete donation is mostly modeled after conceptions of nature. Through anonymity and concealment it creates forms of nonrelatedness that leave space for future imaginings and traces of transnational genetic creators.
At an understaffed and underresourced urban African training hospital, Malawian medical students learn to be doctors while foreign medical students, visiting Malawi as clinical tourists on short-term ...électives, learn about "global health." Scientific ideas circulate fast there; clinical tourists circulate readily from outside to Malawi but not the reverse; medical technologies circulate slowly, erratically, and sometimes not at all. Medicine's uneven globalization is on full display. I extend scholarship on moral imaginations and medical imaginaries to propose that students map these wards variously as places in which—or from which—they seek a better medicine. Clinical tourists, enacting their own moral maps, also become representatives of medicine "out there": points on the maps of others. Ethnographic data show that for Malawians, clinical tourists are colleagues, foils against whom they construct ideas about a superior and distinctly Malawian medicine and visions of possible alternative futures for themselves. In einem unterbesetzten, unterfinanzierten afrikanischen Lehrkrankenhaus werden malawische Medizinstudenten zu Ärzten ausgebildet. Auch ausländische Medizinstudenten studieren dort; sie besuchen Malawi als "klinische Touristen" für kurzfristige Aufenthalte, bei denen sie Wahlfächer belegen und etwas über "globale Gesundheit" lernen. Wissenschaftliche Ideen zirkulieren dort schnell. Medizinische Technologien verbreiten sich langsam, unregelmäßig, und manchmal überhaupt nicht: die ungleiche Globalisierung der Medizin ist unübersehbar, ich erweitere die Literatur über moralische und medizinische Imaginationen und argumentiere, dass die Studenten sich diese Krankenhausabteilungen auf "moralischen Karten" vorstellen, entweder als Orte wo—oder von wo aus—sie eine "bessere Medizin" anstreben. Klinische Touristen (die ihren eigenen moralischen Karten folgen) repräsentieren außerdem die Medizin "da draußen": Sie werden zu Punkten auf den "moralischen Karten" Anderer. Für malawische Medizinstudenten sind diese ausländischen klinischen Touristen Kollegen, ein Hintergrund, vor dem sie Ideen einer überlegenen und spezifisch malawischen Medizin und alternative Zukunftsvisionen für sich selbst konstruieren. Dans un hôpital d'enseignement africain, en sous-effectif et manquant de ressources, les étudiants malawiens apprennent à être médecins alors que les étudiants étrangers, « touristes cliniques » en visite au Malawi, s'informent sur la « santé publique mondiale ». Les idées scientifiques circulent rapidement; les touristes circulent facilement de l'étranger au Malawi mais pas vice-versa; quand les technologies médicales circulent, c'est lentement. La mondialisation inégale de la médecine est exposée. J'accrois la recherche sur les imaginations morales et imaginaires médicaux, argumentant que les étudiants dépeignent cette expérience comme étant un lieu où, et par l'intermédiaire duquel, ils recherchent une médecine meilleure. Les touristes affichent leur scheme moral et représentent également la médecine de « là-bas »: des repères pour les autres. Les données ethnographiques démontrent que pour les Malawiens, les touristes sont des collègues à travers qui ils construisent les concepts d'une médecine malawienne supérieure et d'un avenir différent.
Background: Nowadays, the medical tourism market is one of the most profitable and competitive industries in the world, and it is one of the new developed fields of tourism. Advertising is one of the ...methods of increasing tourist attraction and influencing tourists' decision-making to choose a destination. The present research aimed to simulate the effect of advertising on the attraction of medical tourists in the hospitals of Yazd city. Materials and methods: The present research is applied in terms of research objective, and in terms of methodology, it is in descriptive-analytical research. The statistical community was formed by university professors and experts in the field of medical tourism, and managers of hospitals and medical centers in Yazd. The snowball method was used for sampling. Information was collected through text reviews, questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with experts. The integrated and innovative approach of factor-based modeling and Taguchi method was used for data analysis, and the software used was AnyLogic and MiniTab. Results: The results of the scenario execution revealed that among the advertising tools, internet advertising is more effective, and television ads, specialized tourism magazines, and seminars and conferences are in the next ranks. As the final output of the research, the investigation of the main effects related to each advertising tool led to identification of the suitable level of each tools and the presentation of the most favorable scenario based on the advertising program of Yazd hospitals. Conclusion: Based on the fact that among the advertising tools, internet advertising has the greatest effect on attracting medical tourists, hospital management should pay special attention to internet advertising to attract more tourists in the field of medicine. In this way, more information will be provided to tourists and the demand for medical tourism will increase.
In order to attract more medical tourists to Lithuania and to provide them with more value, it is necessary to update the current medical tourism value proposition presented in 2012. Thus, the aim of ...the study is to identify potential elements of the value of inbound medical tourism and to provide guidelines for the development of the value proposition for medical tourism in Lithuania. The research presents the results of secondary data analysis, the results of content analysis of thes medical tourist’s feedback, and the results of semi-structured interviews with medical tourism experts. Based on the results, the article provides insights what changes could be meaningful in renewing the value proposition of inbound medical tourism in Lithuania, highlighting the importance of renewing the priority of target audience.
People have increasingly engaged in medical tourism to find effective medical treatments but more economical overseas. These travellers use the service of online Medical Tourism Facilitators (MTFs) ...in choosing and arranging medical trips. However, the Covid-19 pandemic and the ban on international travelling disrupted travel and thus seriously affected the tourism businesses, including MTFs. Businesses need to be resilient and pivot their business models to survive and bounce back from the crisis. However, it is less clear how MTFs navigate this Covid-19 pandemic. This paper adopts a case study to explain how an online MTF platform (Dental Departures) responds to the opportunities and challenges and examines how it pivots business models.
This study proposes that storytelling by medical tourism agents can be classified according to story and telling. Authenticity and educability are the key story attributes, while enjoyability, ...descriptiveness, and emotionality are the key telling attributes. A survey of 514 international tourists who visited South Korea mainly for medical purposes statistically validated these attributes and explored their impact on the trust and behavioral intention of medical tourists. The results show that the attributes of the story had less effect than the attributes of telling on increasing trust in medical tourists, and the degree of trust in turn positively predicted behavioral intention.
Liver transplantation began in Colombia in 1979. It is one of the most active countries in this field in Latin America but has faced problems with the regulation and appropriate management of solid ...organ transplantations, including transplant tourism, which is a worldwide problem. There is a well‐structured donation and transplant network regulated by the government in all the stages of the process. In 2017, the country was ranked fourth for the number of liver transplantations (LTs) performed in Latin America, after Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, with a rate of 5.6 LTs per million population. Current regulatory bodies were created to coordinate and provide transparency and equality to transplant recipients. This article describes the evolution, government commissions, assignation criteria, and current status of LT in Colombia.
Within the Asia-Pacific region, the growth of medical tourism (MT) in Thailand has been gearing toward a monumental progress. Consequentially, the various research of its policy, strategy and service ...management have been explored and furthered. Contradictory, the study of local wellbeing equality over the MT has, unfortunately, been in hiatus. The objective of the study is to further the current premise of the literature, test, and prove; arguing that from Thai society's perspectives, the promising MT growth in the kingdom does not necessarily mean an equal establishment of the community’s wellbeing. A quantitative methodology employed and linear regression by SPSS run. 0f 600 online and paper questionnaires distributed to Thai’s medical doctors, resident doctors, medical students (senior year), and tourism scholars, 528 responses were attained. All four tested hypotheses on the perceived growth of Thailand’s MT toward local community’s unequal economic, social, healthcare, and environmental aspects, approved. That interprets the issue of policy isolation between MT’s investment versus community’s benefits.
Medical tourism based on transnational journeys for health care, cure, and well-being is being widely discussed in the literature. As a fast-developing phenomenon, there are different views and ...perspectives on the concerns of medical tourists and various impacts created in destination areas. This paper critically observes the exertions of medical tourism on destination areas in the light of economic and socio-cultural influences. This paper tries to bring out the muddles of the phenomenon based on empirical research. The paper suggests that the socio-cultural impact of medical tourism on the health care of the poor local people must be viewed seriously and calls for rigid and efficient legislation from the authorities to enable and strengthen the public healthcare system.
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