medical tourism plays an important role in national revenue of many countries; this industry earns about 100 billion dollars for the governments each year. however, tourism is not developed in iran and it is in its initial paces. as a matter of fact, the ministry of health recognized tourism-therapy in 2003. in addition, by doing this, rather than supporting tourism-therapy, the ministry mainly...

Health tourism is of growing interest for tourism destinations and serves as a key theme to add value and to diff erentiate destinations’ tourism product and service bundles. In tourism research recent studies underline the importance of various forms of health tourism in the Alps. However, due to the fact that health tourism defi nitions vary greatly amongst academics one can hardly assess the...

This article is a commentary of an overview on "medical tourism" submitted by Lunt and Marrion, which describes a framework for the study of the issues related to medical tourism. The commentary attempts to differentiate between the current interest in medical tourism and the time-honored and well-established treatment abroad from countries with underdeveloped health systems. The commentary als...

This paper examines the grid of sentiment that structures medical travel to India. In contrast to studies that render emotion as ancillary, the paper argues that affect is fundamental to medical travel's ability to ease the linked somatic, emotional, financial, and political injuries of being ill 'back home'. The ethnographic approach follows the scenes of medical travel within the Indian corpo...

Patients are crossing national borders in search of affordable and timely health care. Many medical tourism companies are now involved in organizing cross-border health services. Despite the rapid expansion of the medical tourism industry, few standards exist to ensure that these businesses organize high-quality, competent international health care. Addressing the regulatory vacuum, 10 standard...

The purpose – Accurately forecasting the demand for international health tourism is important to newly-emerging markets in the world. The aim of this study was presents a more suitable and accurate model for forecasting the demand for health tourism that should be more theoretically useful. Design – Applying GM(1,1) with adaptive levels of α (hereafter GM(1,1)-α model) to provide a concise pred...

Dr. Milstein is the chief physician at Mercer Health and Benefits and medical director of the Pacific Business Group on Health — both in San Francisco. Dr. Smith is the president and chief executive officer of the California HealthCare Foundation, Oakland, CA. Wachter RM. The “dis-location” of U.S. medicine — the implications of medical outsourcing. N Engl J Med 2006;354:661-5. The globalizatio...

Globalization through the internet provides an opportunity to market services, including health care, across the world. Marketing health care services over the internet and social media is an increasing practice carried out by medical tourism facilitators (MTFs) so as to reach a wider audience (1). Traveling from one country to another to seek health care services has been termed medical touris...