What is health and medical tourism?

Abstract

Despite increasing social, economic and political interest in the growing global marketplace of health and medical tourism, it remains relatively unexamined in sociological and tourism literature. In this paper, I seek to understand health and medical tourism by briefly exploring its history, varying definitions, and contemporary developments. This highlights how health and medical tourism is a subjective practice and embodied experience which, due to increasing options available to tourists, is difficult to classify. Furthermore, as health and medical tourism involves an active body that is not restricted by time and place, it challenges traditional sociological understandings of tourism, which classify tourism as a passive, escapist and leisurely activity that occurs over ‘there’ in contrast to ‘here’.