Medical Tourism in general

The first recorded instance of people travelling for medical treatment dates back thousands of years ago to the Antic Greeks.
Spa towns and sanitaria were early forms of medical tourism. In 18th-century Europe patients visited spas because there were places with supposedly health-giving mineral waters, treating diseases from gout to liver disorders and bronchitis.

Travelling abroad for treatment has experienced a real boom over the past few years in countries of Western Europe and America. Today, 5% of all international journeys are related to medical tourism. About 14 million people decide to seek health services abroad. Factors that have led to the increasing popularity of medical travel include the high cost of health care, long waiting times for certain procedures, the ease and affordability of international travel, and improvements in both technology and standards of care and cure in many countries. The avoidance of waiting times is the leading factor for medical tourism. It is cost effective and less time consuming with highest certainty of remedial treatment as for disease and restoration of health to go to USA, UK,  Taiwan, India, Brazil, Hungary, Romania, Czech Republic and Serbia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia,  Japan, Chain, Hong Kong, Australia and some other world class countries as well for a few days to make an intervention, but also to make a break get to know another country.

With transportation, expenses and escort the total costs are a few times lower than in countries of their origin because the country of origin due to wrong diagnosis, a patent suffers long involving huge costs and sometimes wrong treatment leads to patent's last breath. In the structure of the current total turnover in medical tourism, 40% are on dental services, 42% in orthopedics, cardiology, cardiac surgery and neurosurgery, and 15% for aesthetic surgery. To emphasize, the key factor in selecting a destination, besides the price itself, is certainly the standard of medical services, the high expertise and hospitality of the hospital staff and nursing as well as the attractiveness of the site in a tourist sense.

No doubt, The future surely belongs to development of health tourism. Private insurance companies are showing an increasing interest and involvement, and worldwide hospital chains are more and more interested in investments in the field of health tourism.