What’s where? Why there? And why care? A geography of responsibility in medical tourism

Summary

Flushed with excitement over the panacea medical tourism seems to promise for so many, have stakeholders paused long enough in the construction of the medical tourism industry to reflect on the striking economic, social, political and technological imbalances in both home and destination countries underlying the relatively novel phenomenon of medical tourism? What has actually been democratized and levelled, and for whom? This chapter geographically situates medical tourism supply and demand as well as responsibility for it by exploring what is where, why it’s there, and the challenges we face in caring about this uneven distribution.