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contexts > human activities > travel > medical tourism

Preferred term

medical tourism  

Definition

  • The term medical tourism refers to two distinct, both fairly recent, phenomena: (1) physicians and medical trainees from developed countries who travel to less developed countries to provide medical care, and (2) patients, generally from more developed countries, who travel to less developed countries seeking less expensive medical care or medical procedures (including transplantations) that are unavailable or illegal in their countries of origin. The first type of medical tourism cynically refers to those medical practitioners from Western countries who travel to developing countries for short periods of time to provide medical services, usually for free. [Source: Encyclopedia of Global Health; Medical Tourism]

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URI

https://concepts.sagepub.com/social-science/concept/medical_tourism

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