4S+'08+Abstract+-+Health+Travel+Discursive+Construction+-+Accepted-presented

TITLE

From Health Travel To Health Tourism: A discursive Analysis

ABSTRACT:

While still a nascent industry, “medical tourism” represents an increasingly popular alternative for medical care and an expanding motivation for the economic and political restructuring of healthcare resources in some developing nations. Nevertheless it remains a largely undocumented practice. The term “Medical tourism” defines a specific transnational institution, referring to an industry with components spread across wide gulfs of distance and culture, and thus presents new challenges for analysis. The ongoing process of formation and definitional construction has implications for those who will directly be future participants and for those indirectly affected by the structural changes it contributes to. I analyze the contemporary discourse of “medical tourism” to understand its constituent institutions and practices, the effect of its formation on preexisting systems and conceptions of healthcare, and its distinction from earlier discourses of “health travel.” Through discursive analysis I inquire into medical tourism as a site marked by liminal tensions, between multi-local discourse and locally situated practices, multiple definitions of the industry, justifications constructed as individual choice and as an economically necessary alternative to national healthcare, and in power relations between destination countries (largely in the Nonwestern developing world) and departure countries (Richer, Western nations). Medical tourism offers STS a fertile new system of relations between multiple cultures and biomedical/technoscience knowledge(s) and practice(s) that constitute new liminal interactions and offers an ideal site for observations about conflicts and negotiations that arise. Looking at the notional industry as a network of new relationships currently under construction as participants negotiate these tensions, I focus on the discursive shift between historical “health travel” (i.e. relocation for the treatment of TB, or to access a natural bathes) to the re-inscription of “medical tourism” in its current form of institutional discourse today. Examining media and textual representations as evidence of differing conceptions of patients and the complex dynamic of agency and empowerment as this new form intersects with ongoing tensions around healthcare access, individual choice and expertise.