Talk:Medical tourism

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Contents 1 Medical Tourism in the USA 2 Medical Tourism http://www.medicaltourism.com 3 Merger 4 Neutrality issues

[edit] Medical Tourism in the USA

links to MedRetreat, a for profit medical tourism company, if medicaltourism.com doesn't make the cut with unbiased reporting about providers, why do we have a for profit service linked?

[edit] Medical Tourism http://www.medicaltourism.com

Commercial sites should not be promoted in Wikipedia. However this is a unique neutral non-commerical site that does not promote one institution or individual over another. It is an important contribution to the community, and provides an illustration of what is being discussed in the Wikipedia text and the resources available. This happens often throughout Wikipedia, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typo3, or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigs_list

What is "commercial" about www.medicaltourism.com? It does not even contain advertising (the links are posted by patients and the medical tourism community without charge) like Craigs list. As I read the Wikipedia pillars, it complies... Hopefully I have made the case in a satisfactory manner. Unless i hear more specificlaly why it should not be done, I would like to add Medicaltourism, a non-commercial neutral link, back unless someone explains why not. If I am not inserting this type of link right (even though it seems to be done the same was as was done in the other numerous examples), please let me know what specificially needs to be done to make this entry compatible with these others. Thanks, your timely response is appreciated. SP 18:16, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merger

I would support the merger of this article with the medical value travel article, and that medical tourism become the name of this particular subject. Medical value travel has 188 hits on a Google search while Medical tourism has more than 83 million. Seems Medical value travel isn't really catching on as the term for this trend. On both searches, by the way, the Wikipedia entry came up first. Both articles need to be rewritten and condensed, with greater attention to given to references and citations, as well as wikification throughout. Also I wonder if Medical tourism in Thailand and the oddly named Medical Tourism India should also be merged with the medical tourism article? -Wisekwai 20:03, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

• I also agree with the merger. --SP 06:43, 29 July 2006 (UTC)
• Support merger of Medical value travel, Medical tourism in Thailand, and Medical Tourism India to Medical tourism. -AED 00:20, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support merger of all three into medical tourism. InvictaHOG 10:53, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support for all 3 articles into medical tourism. --Sylvain Mielot 02:54, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Neutrality issues

This article contains quite a few neutrality problems. As currently written, most of the material is unsourced, e.g.

• Medical tourists are generally residents of the industrialized nations of the world, the countries they travel are typically the less developed ones with lower cost of high quality medical care

Who is vouching for the medical care as being "high quality?"

No source is given for the assertion that "health care insurance companies within industrialized nations have begun considering medical tourism as a potential cost-saving measure."

It is suggested that in the U. S. "most view Medical Tourism as risky because of lack of information, confusion and understanding." No sources are provided, and no evidence is presented that medical tourism is not "risky."

One of the reasons cited for an increase in medical tourism is "favorable currency exchange rates in the global economy." But this is certainly not true for the United States.

The tone of the article is overwhelmingly promotional. Dpbsmith (talk) 16:26, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

I respectfully disagree. This article is a good overview. While editing can improve the quality of the article with qualifiers and more objective statistics, as is, it is still informative and a good overview to get persons started in learning about the topic. This is exactly what Wikipedia is meant to do. --SP 06:41, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

''The American Standard of Joint Commission International Accredidation, that's who. If you view the JCI website you can find that the quality of these institutions is better than most of the "best" hospitals in America. These countries have gone through political/policy changes to insure their viability in the world market, knowing that if their medical care for cross-border patients were to be anywhere near slack compared to the U.S. or England would be incomprehensible. This is resulting in higher standards and close patient-physician interaction with very good outcomes.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.118.108.51 (talk • contribs) 20:08, 8 September 2006 (UTC).