Abstract

Health care has ceased to be a set of goods and services delivered only locally; it is now a truly globalized phenomenon, including medical migration—the “brain drain” of health care practitioners, largely from the developing to the developed world; telemedicine; multi-regional clinical trials; the global intellectual property regime that both facilitates innovation and stymies access to drugs; and the flow of tissues, including pandemic influenza vaccine strains. This chapter focuses on one part of this globalization: Medical tourism.