Last year, I blogged about “Medical tourism...lessons from the California gold rush”. It’s taken me a while to write the postscript to this, but I finally got around to it last week when I spoke at the European Medical Travel Conference in Barcelona. (You can download my presentation “Medical Tourism: After the Goldrush” as a pdf file on the IMTJ web site).
In my gold rush analogy, I describe how in 2005/6, medical tourism became the next big thing.
In Google News for 2006, you’ll see headlines appearing like these:
- “One million medical tourists flocking to India”
- “Bumrungrad attracts more than 400,000 foreign patients each year”
- “Philippines is set to cash in on the $3-trillion global medical tourism market”
- “Half a million Britons travel for treatment....”
News stories appeared around the world about a surge in medical tourism. The first prospectors for “medical tourism gold” appeared - medical tourism agents and facilitators, overseas hospitals and clinics were seeking their fortune in the world of medical tourism. The tales of medical tourism gold began to multiply. Estimates of the number of medical tourists were in the hundreds of thousands, the millions, and then the tens of millions. Few medical tourism prospectors questioned the validity of these claims of the discovery of a rich vein of income or whether it was sustainable.......
.........Read the full article at IMTJ: Go to "Medical tourism: After the gold rush"