IMTJadmin - 07/03/2008 11:21
Are you in the medical travel business, or in medical tourism? Are those who move from one country to another for the purposes of treatment medical travellers or medical tourists? Does it matter? From one point of view - the most important one - it clearly does not matter. Whether travellers or tourists, our clients, our customers are patients first and foremost, the people for whom this industry must care. The patients’ welfare comes first, whether they live next door to the facility or have flown around the world. So much can be agreed upon.
Nevertheless, different words have different meanings, and for a phenomenon that is only gradually entering the public consciousness, choosing the right one is important. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED) defines the words as follows: Tourist “a person making a tour or visit as a holiday, often as part of a group; a person travelling for pleasure, esp. abroad”; Traveller “a person who is travelling or on a journey; a person who travels or journeys, esp. abroad.”
Both definitions involve travel, obviously. And helpfully, both include the “esp. abroad”. The difference is in purpose. The tourist travels as part of a holiday, for pleasure. The traveller is merely someone who is travelling. Prefix these words with the adjective “medical” and you have your answer. Some medical travellers are tourists, but not all. All medical tourists are travellers. If you need to choose a term to encompass the industry, traveller is a more comprehensive, and more accurate, one than tourist.
There’s more to it than that, though. In this age of international travel, where long haul travel is thought of less as a privilege than a chore, despite the fact that it has never been so convenient or inexpensive, few regard themselves as tourists. Leisure travellers, yes, business travellers, almost certainly, but “tourists” - the word seems to have been reserved for coach parties following a guide sheep like up the slopes to the Parthenon in Greece or on camel back to the pyramids in Egypt. Those of us following no fixed itinerary would bridle at the idea of being a tourist. The SOED gives a sense of this with the illustrative example it gives from the works of travel writer Paul Theroux, who adds the adjective “credulous” to tourists to complete the impression: “Guidebooks… repeat falsifications... for credulous tourists.”
Add “medical” to tourists, and you have almost a dismissive term. It describes someone who for pleasure is travelling abroad for medical treatment. The fact that many medical travellers will incorporate a holiday as part of their recuperation shouldn’t disguise the fact that the pleasure element isn’t the motive for their trip. To those patients, that cosmetic procedure is important enough for them to plan, pay and then travel what is often a significant distance. Once there, the recuperative element is one which few physicians would argue against. It isn’t the prime reason they are there, and shouldn’t be used as a label for this subset of medical travellers, let alone those who are travelling for medically necessary, frequently life-saving procedures.
Does any of it matter? Well, considering the challenges the industry faces, presenting critics with an easy target in the form of an inaccurate label is best avoided. In the United States there were recent proposals to revise the rate of inheritance tax. The proposals were defeated, not least because the opponents of the change characterised the tax as “Death Tax”. Words do matter.
