Medical tourism is the prospect of an escape and a surgery, consolidated in an often exotic vacation to a lush country.  Among the top spots for medical tourism are locales such as Brazil and Costa Rica.  Countries with warmer weather tend to be the primary spots medical tourists want to go to for procedures.  Other popular locations include South Africa, Thailand, and India: in fact, India has developed a medical system that makes it the top medical tourism competitor.  Part of what makes India a good spot for tourists is the accreditation it is working on through the Joint Commission of Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, an organization in the United States with a purpose to improve the safety of procedures and care the medical industry in general provides.  Regulating how the medical industry works, Joint Commission of Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations  provides many of the top hospitals in the world with qualifications.  Such qualifications appeal to India because it would be able to look after patients with an international accreditation, lending them even more dominance in the medical world.  Further, people want to enjoy the costs for a surgery in India.  To replace a heart valve in the US can cost about two hundred thousand dollars.  However, in India, the same surgery is about ten thousand dollars.

The beauty of the country also makes it difficult to shun such a deal.  The Taj Mahal and other astonishing locations entrenched with deep history and beauty make a trip for back surgery seem more gratifying and enjoyable.  India, too, is more inclined to attempt what many doctors in the West might name “New Age medicine.”  However, their brand of medicine dates back to millennia, and often the research done to disprove Ayurvedic therapies has instead proven its status as a reputable form of medicine.  Another reason India is a quality option is with the liberalization of its economy, homegrown doctors who had fled for other opportunities in the West slowly started to return.  Since these doctors have had the opportunity to work abroad in Western locations, their international credentials are attractive to people searching for cheap health care with some semblance to the kind hospitals in their country provide.

Another place people choose to go for surgical procedures is Thailand.  There are many people in the United States who are self-employed, usually lacking the resources and funds for expensive health insurance.  Additionally, as part of the effort to make the hospital system there more efficient, Thailand started to employ interpreters, making the system more accessible to those in the United States and other parts of the West due to the increase of English speakers in its hospital structure.  However, English is not the only language spoken: there are interpreters and speakers for about fifteen languages, which would explain the twenty thousand foreign patients in Phuket for the past few years.  Doctors in Thailand also have a increasing knowledge and familiarity with Western techniques with the rise of medical tourism.  Perhaps the cause for people choosing such a faraway hospital is the success rates.  The results of major surgeries are often similar to the top hospitals in the entire world, and in the end, the results are what count the most, making India and Thailand leading competitors in global medicine.