Medical Tourism or Medical Travel ?
Medical tourism or medical travel defines the travel for receiving treatment abroad. The medical tourists or patients seek for treatment outside their country due to various reasons.
Yet the goal is the same: to receive a high quality medical treatment abroad at an affordable price.
Reasons for your medical travel
Are you familiar with these?
- Exploding healthcare costs
- High insurance premium
- No insurance coverage
- Underinsured
- The insurance company has refused to pay for advanced medical procedure like Artificial Disc Replacement or certain procedures are not available in the home country
- Long waiting times for orthopedic surgeries
- Unsatisfying healthcare system
There have been an overwhelming number of definitions of what medical tourism or medical travel means. But it is obvious that the primary objective and the explicit purpose of the medical travel is the medical treatment abroad and not sightseeing or leisure.
Medical tourism is just a new term for an old process. People around the Mediterranean Sea traveled to the temples of the healing god, Asklepios or Aesculapius to find help. They would sleep the night in the temple outside the city. The god would appear in their dreams and advise them the right medical treatment. Aesculapius with the snake enlaced around the stick was famous for his art in medicine, surgery and healing herbs.
An important factor for the development of the medical tourism is the growing “self pay” market of people who prefer to pay when needed rather than to use expensive healthcare insurances. The internet use, the improved mobility because of better airfares and less obstacles in entering certain countries support strongly this phenomenon.
Even if figures of patients using this industry of medical travel are not reliable at the moment it is clear that medical tourism is more than just a passing phenomenon. In the next years a boom is expected of people benefiting of treatment abroad. Medical Tourism will be a globalized healthcare process following the trend of outsourcing to those providers who prove more efficiency,that means the similar quality at a better price.
The destination of your medical travel
Still, price and quality is not the whole story of the medical travel. The word travel implies a destination. That would be the next step in the process of finding the solution for the reasons described above.
