ABSTRACT
Medical tourism appears to be a rapidly growing tourism product and market. Evans (2008) reported that the estimated worth of the worldwide medical-tourism market was about US$60 billion in 2006 and projected it to climb to US$100 billion by 2012. In an Asian context, and of direct relevance to this chapter, Singh (2008) estimated that US$4.4 billion revenue will be generated by medical tourism in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and India in 2012. The expansion of medical tourism is regarded as being largely attributable to the broad globalization of health-care services (Heung et al. 2011), whereby regulatory boundaries between nations have diminished; therefore enabling patients to move across borders for medical treatment with greater ease.
