Gareth+-+Memo+-13+-+Project+Research+Grid


 * **Aims** || **Questons** || **Emerging arguments** ||  || **Data Source** (I shifted it, because these aren't listed in relation to the three previous columns.) || **Literatures** ||
 * Develop a rigorous empirical definition and typology of international health travel with justification for delimitations. || What forms of healthcare related practice are present internationally? What is "medical tourism" as a form of healthcare delivery, as practice? || Liberalizing/privatizing healthcare may/maynot provide better care. While it may or may not be changing the way healthcare is conceived/practiced. ||  || Read secondary literature on: healthcare contexts in local sites examining practice and medical knowledge where available, history of medical practice in sites, healthcare policy in departure and recipient sites… || Ethnographies and histories of medicine and the body found in Medical Anthropology and STS, centrally those discussing cross border practices (i.e. Marsha Inhorn or Margaret Lock) ||
 * Generate new knowledge about the process of localization/variation within Scientific knowledge and practice. || What differences exist in medical knowledge and practice in different local contexts? || The popular conception of medical knowledge as universal and transferable is counter to an STS literature about heterogeneity (ie. Berg & Mol Eds 1998). ||  || ... international health policy, international trade policy (GATS), standardization and accrediation, neoliberal reform, tourism patterns, patient experience, industry formation, and Medical tourism itself. || Policy Studies and Comparative Policy Studies of health policy, especially those that focus on recent shift to neoliberal and private governance (ie. Altenstetter; Blouin Et al) ||
 * Generat new knowledge about conceptions of "good medicine" and "good healthcare" that are at play, and how they are changing in light of cultural change in late/post-modernity. How these conceptions result in different practice and quality of care. || What is "Good Medicine"? Is it multiple? Is it changing? || The mechanism for evaluating medicine is relative, but there are universal mechanisms for evaluation as well ie. Commodification (Sharp; Schepner-Hughes and Waquant) and Standardization (Altenstetter 2008; Bowker 2000; Demortain 2008; Lampland 2009) ||  || Comparison between contexts for analytic purchase, India and Philippine Case Studies, Possible additional Case- Thailand. || Ethnographies and histories that describe the area/nation in which comparative work will be done (ie. Gupta, Ong, Anderson, Fortun in asian contexts; and Starr, Doyal, or Rosenberg in the US) ||
 * Construct a system of factors that mark differential success in founding and development of medical tourism industry. || How does an industry form? How does a health industry differ from IT or other buisiness cycles? || Mechanisms of capital accumulation by elites have been traditionally tied to specific states (as modeled in WST -Wallerstein) but recent globalization has centered on "deteritorialization" and the shifting borders of power based on multivariate cause. ||  || Ethnographic interviews, and brief participant observation with agents and participants including local patients, local doctors, and healthcare advocacy/policy professionals in destination and reception sites. || Methods texts for use in crafting the study ie. Strauss on Grounded theory, Smith on Institutional Ethnography, and Foucault on genaology. ||
 * Evaluate positive/negative effect of medical tourism on preexisting healthcare system. || Has travel for healthcare, and globalization more broadly, helped or harmed access & qualty of care in local sites? || People are/are not better off then they were 20 years ago. ||  || Survey of statistical/quantitative data about the growth of international travel, international trade in healthcare services, and medical tourism. || National and Industrial documents tracking the industry ||
 * Generate new knowledge about participant contributions to medical practice within the new model "choice" and "transparecy" that suggests patients as active partners in healthcare, and labels healthcare professionals as "partners". || Has neoliberalism and privatization changed medical practice/knowledge? || Choice based healthcare policy is the cats meow in the new right (altenstetter) and in popular press in the US media… but some critiques of this point to its reactionary retraction of reforms of the last sixty years. ||  || Survey of statistical/quantitative data about quality of healthcare and access to care in the nations in quesiton as sounding board for qualitative analysis. || Policy Studies, geography and sociology of health and tourism. ||
 * Form recommendations for health policy and regulation reform in medical tourism and domestic healthcare delivery. || How can we improve access and quality of care through policy? How can we move towards, potentially multiple, "good medicine(s)" || Despite popular conception that the only thing wrong with medicine is high price, I think I'll find something else to mention. ||  ||   || Primary literature on healthcare policy, medical tourism, as well as patient experience within and outside of medical tourism. ||