Recently we met with Julie Munro, CEO of InterMed Global to chat about medical tourism. InterMed Global provides consultation, management and training in medical travel and health tourism. This is part one of our interview with her.

HDJ- What is medical tourism?

JULIE- Medical tourism refers to the rapidly-growing practice of patients traveling across international borders to obtain health care. A decade ago, most of the activity was affluent people from developing countries seeking medical care in the high specialty hospitals in the US (like Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins) and the west.

In the past decade this has been reversed. It’s become a movement of American patients, Canadians, Australians, Brits and others spending their own money to find alternatives to expensive medical procedures at home. This includes all kinds of minor and major elective procedures like cosmetic surgery, gastric bypass surgery, heart bypass surgery, even organ transplantation and neurosurgery. There’s even a list of Top 10 World’s Best Hospitals for Medical Tourists. (mtqua.org)

People are traveling because the treatment they need at home costs too much, or they have to wait months or years for it, or it’s an experimental or research treatment, or it’s not available here but it is in other countries. An example is the Birmingham hip resurfacing procedure, a procedure that doesn’t destroy your hip socket, and gives you much better mobility than a hip replacement. It’s now available in the US but people could go to India and other countries to get it several years before it was FDA approved. Stem cell therapy is another example. There are many countries that now offer a number of treatments using stem cells, from helping joints recover quicker, to treating peripheral artery disease, and they’re trying it on Parkinson’s and other nerve disorders.

HDJ-Why did you decide on medical tourism as a career path?

JULIE- I have lived and worked in Asia for much of the past 30 years, and I know firsthand the excellent treatment and care available in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and India. Healthcare today is at a critical crossroads, not only in the US but in all the western countries. Everyone agrees the new Obama plan does very little to reduce or control costs. Considering the aging population, the enormous demands on all aspects of healthcare by retiring baby boomers, huge costs of medicines, and new treatments for disease that require tremendous expenditures on equipment, technology and drugs, people are going to be forced to look anywhere and everywhere to get the care they need at a decent cost and in a timely manner.

The recession has hit healthcare very hard, and every country’s healthcare costs are starting to weigh heavily on its citizens. Whether public system (Canada, UK, France etc.) or private (US), this is not a problem that’s going to go away any time soon. We’ll be living with the impact of mounting costs of healthcare for decades to come.

Stay tuned next week for part 2!