ABSTRACT
From culture, to cookery, and to eco-tourism, the holiday experience is becoming more and more diverse. Since the Asian financial crisis of 1997, medical tourism has increasingly contributed to this trend, particularly in Thailand and India. The main motivation of our project was to undertake a research study on medical tourism which has hitherto been almost exclusively approached from the point of view of media representation. Indeed, medical tourism has been widely commented on by the press, which presents the ‘sea, sun, sand and surgery’ (Connell 2005) phenomenon as ‘the’ answer for patients living in developed countries and having to deal with long consultation waiting lists, and high medical costs. At the time of undertaking the research, few articles had placed medical tourism in perspective and therefore we wanted to go a little further than the headline story that the media and the medical tourism stakeholders keep selling. Through a comparison between India and Thailand, our objective was to better assess medical tourism, its development, its impacts. Medical tourism takes place in different parts of the world today and emphasises well the globalisation in the field of healthcare. In this context, we thought that the mirroring effect between the two countries would be very effective to deepen our understanding of the phenomenon, and to bring out the main elements constituting this trend.
