Medical and Social Risks of Health Tourism
摘要
The health tourism industry is rapidly expanding. Clients often travel abroad for medically motivated trips due to preventing or rehabilitating illness, treating acute diseases, mitigating chronic disease consequences, or maintaining good psycho-physical conditions through recreational wellness, spas, and bath offers. Other reasons include lower costs of treatments abroad, shorter waiting lists compared with their home country, availability of advanced biomedical innovations, affordability of some medical procedures, or less stringent regulations than in their home country. Medical tourism has developed primarily for two fundamental reasons: economic accessibility and permissible bioethical legislation regarding some clinical issues. However, many areas of medical tourism make space for questionable medical quality standards of requested procedures or (un)permitted health services, ignoring the bioethical principle of equal access to healthcare services and many other questionable impacts on health. This is why health tourism demands a clear need for a precise definition of unified quality standards and bioethical norms in health protection at the international level.