Medical Tourism: A Lot Of Sellers But Not Many Buyers?
I must confess that I have a weakness for medical tourism. Patients have always been ready to go on a pilgrimage to find the world’s leading expert (we call it ‘key opinon leader’ now) hoping to find a cure. As long as traditional leaders in the field of Medicine have been the Germans, the French and the English -with some occasional Austrian and Spanish name in the mix- traffic of wealthy patients across Europe is nothing new.
Since we entered the antibiotics era, these leaders started to be located mainly in the United States, the cradle of modern, technology-driven Medicine. Thus hi-tech centers got ready to welcome foreign patients, building strong International Customer Support departments. A random example -by no means the only one- would be the Mayo Clinic. On their website you can see that their wealthy patients speak Arabic or come from Latin America. These healthcare services have a long tradition of client-oriented work because they work for private clients that pay for their treatment (sometimes the client is not the patient himself but his family). The important thing was never the price, but the patient. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Diario Medico*
Aid worker administers medicine to Haitian child in Léogâne.With the current wave of natural disasters and international conflicts extant in the world today, the number of people engaged in global humanitarian relief, including medicine, is growing. As a result, there have arisen special concerns for providing medical care and other types of assistance during humanitarian efforts. At the Wilderness Society summer annual meeting in 2010, Cindy Bitter, MD, led a round table discussion entitled “Challenges and Controversies in Humanitarian Medicine.” I will use materials she prepared for the syllabus to offer some observations about the general topic of humanitarian medicine, which is very often practiced in outdoor settings that are austere.
