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Health and medical tourism
Edited by C. Michael Hall
Medical tourism: a brave new world
Medical tourism or the provision of transnational health-related services is an emerging sector with its own issues, but also with promising facts and figures. Different actors fit in a multi-cluster services system - for instance the governments of developing countries, specialized medical services ([61] Moe et al. , 2007), adjacent services (logistics, hotel, hospitality and tourism services), E-health companies and transport services. The way the different media report about this phenomenon has changed immensely during the past years. Therefore, an examination of the different media streams using a discourse analysis approach enhances a better understanding of medical tourism, from a noise over an emerging practice to a sector with its own dysfunctions.
Because of the several lines of industries providing services, we can acknowledge that what started in a medical context has transformed itself into a cross-disciplinary stakeholder-driven sector. How medical tourism is portrayed in the media has its effect on how the sector is seen by the general public, both locally and internationally. An analysis of these several lines of media enables us to detect where a rupture ([29] Foucault, 1969) has taken place: an invasion of a new reality realizing a change in the worldviews about how to receive and search for health care. "Rupture" is used here in a sense adapted from that of b28 b30 b32 b31 Foucault (1966, 1976, 1977a, b), a radical cleavage in discourses about punishment, madness or medical care around 1900. Here, the growing complexity in the tension between the global and the local has been taken as a point of departure, caused among other things by many "new voices" and the plural reactions from diverse interacting networks all over the world. "Ruptures" have become more familiar in a less radical way, but produce the same type of incommesurable frameworks as their consequences in this network society ([15] Castells, 2000). An interesting case of a rupture in this sense can be found in the area of medical tourism.
A first step is to undertake an exploration of the scientific literature and its link with the underlying discourse which originated in Europe and the USA. This first step is necessary to assess...