What is Medical Tourism?

Medical Tourism or Health Tourism is the term initially coined by travel agencies and mass media to describe the practice of traveling across international borders to obtain healthcare services. Today medical tourism is a rapidly growing industry that enables people residing in one country to travel to another country to receive medical, dental and surgical care of comparable quality to that available in their home countries for a fraction of the domestic cost. In addition, patients may choose to travel abroad because certain procedures are not available in their home countries, or because the wait is too long (e.g. Canadian cancer patients traveling across the border to the U.S.).

Contrary to popular belief, the concept of medical tourism is not a novel one. The first recorded instance of medical tourism dates back thousands of years to when Greek pilgrims traveled from all over the Mediterranean to the small territory in the Saronic Gulf called Epidauria. Also, Americans have been engaged in medical tourism, although they may not have called it that way. For decades, many Americans have traveled to such acclaimed medical institutions as the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, MD Anderson Hospital in Texas, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and John Hopkins Hospital in Maryland