International medical travel, or medical tourism

Ormond, M.E.


Each year, millions of people around the world, disenfranchised by the restrictive national laws and unresponsive health systems in their countries of residence, circumvent these barriers by traveling to countries where their desired medical treatment is more accessible to them. These patients' international medical travels (IMT), sometimes referred to as “medical tourism,” have drawn popular, political, commercial, and scholarly attention, first, to the diverse global patchwork of health-care ideologies and practices; second, to the national containerization of health care; and, third, to the consequences of IMT in traveling patients' source, transit, and receiving countries.