The origin of medical tourism

Internationally, medical tourism is commonly known as medical tourism, health tourism, surgical tourism or medical outsourcing. Relatively speaking, healthy tourism has a longer history, which can be traced back to14th century or even earlier (some experts think it can be traced back to prehistoric times), and its scope is also relatively common, that is, "any way to visit yourself or your family healthily", such as sea bath, hot spring bath, massage and beauty. And medical tourism evolved from health tourism. Compared with health tourism, medical tourism focuses on external features such as invasive surgery and medical diagnosis, including weight loss and anti-aging projects. Ideally, medical tourism has only achieved great development in the last twenty or thirty years, but its history can also be traced back to the British colonial era.

Although there are great differences between medical tourism and health tourism, some scholars do not make a strict distinction between them in academic discourse, but tend to use the word health tourism to cover all tourism activities related to well-being. But in industry, as Google search engine shows, medical tourism is far more popular than health tourism (table 1). Compared with the former two, surgical tourism and medical insurance have more exact meanings, but their specific contents are relatively narrow and are relatively seldom used in the industry.