12-04-2005, 10:44 AM
<b>Controversy in India over medical tourism</b> <!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->NEW DELHI As foreigners flock to India to find lower health-care costs and avoid long waiting times, the rapid growth of this medical tourism has begun to create significant opposition among doctors here.
Providing cheap treatment for foreigners is becoming an important source of foreign revenue for India, and some doctors are growing angry at the government's focus on it while the health of a large portion of India's population is neglected.
This has prompted an argument between those who assert that medical tourism benefits the Indian health-care system by improving its standards and those who say the practice worsens disparities in the distribution of health care that are already critical.
Medical tourism is forecast to become a $2.3 billion business for India by 2012. Some analysts predict it will be the next major driver of the Indian economy after information technology. Already, about 150,000 visitors seek treatment every year, and this figure is rising at 15 percent annually.
Growing confidence abroad in the Indian system has meant that as health-care costs soar in the United States and as hospital waiting lists grow longer in Europe and elsewhere, more people are prepared to travel to cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore for major operations like heart surgery and organ transplants, as well as for more minor cosmetic treatments.
But the surge in the popularity of India as a place for treatment is triggering complaints among some leading members of the medical community, like Dr. Samiran Nundy, a gastrointestinal surgeon in New Delhi, and Amit Sengupta from the India's People's Health Movement, who wrote about it recently in The British Medical Journal.
<b>"It is time," they said, "for the government to pay more attention to improving the health of Indians rather than to enticing foreigners from affluent countries with offers of low-cost operations and convalescent visits to the Taj Mahal."</b>
...............
<b>According to a 2005 World Health Organization report, India has only 4 doctors for every 10,000 people; in Britain, by contrast, there are 18. In rural India, state hospitals have little money for basic medical equipment or for maintenance of buildings, which are often filthy and overcrowded. India has less than one hospital bed and one physician for every 1,000 people,</b> the World Health Organization said.
...................
Dr. Naresh Trehan, a heart surgeon who set up a private cardiac hospital in New Delhi that attracts hundreds of foreign patients every year, dismissed the anxieties expressed in the British Medical Journal article.
"We hope that we can do this without affecting the treatment for the local population," Trehan said. "<b>It's like space travel. People will always say 'There is so much hunger, why are you doing it?' That's not the point.</b>
<b>"I see this as a complement to internal health care. We are putting in infrastructure."</b>
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Providing cheap treatment for foreigners is becoming an important source of foreign revenue for India, and some doctors are growing angry at the government's focus on it while the health of a large portion of India's population is neglected.
This has prompted an argument between those who assert that medical tourism benefits the Indian health-care system by improving its standards and those who say the practice worsens disparities in the distribution of health care that are already critical.
Medical tourism is forecast to become a $2.3 billion business for India by 2012. Some analysts predict it will be the next major driver of the Indian economy after information technology. Already, about 150,000 visitors seek treatment every year, and this figure is rising at 15 percent annually.
Growing confidence abroad in the Indian system has meant that as health-care costs soar in the United States and as hospital waiting lists grow longer in Europe and elsewhere, more people are prepared to travel to cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore for major operations like heart surgery and organ transplants, as well as for more minor cosmetic treatments.
But the surge in the popularity of India as a place for treatment is triggering complaints among some leading members of the medical community, like Dr. Samiran Nundy, a gastrointestinal surgeon in New Delhi, and Amit Sengupta from the India's People's Health Movement, who wrote about it recently in The British Medical Journal.
<b>"It is time," they said, "for the government to pay more attention to improving the health of Indians rather than to enticing foreigners from affluent countries with offers of low-cost operations and convalescent visits to the Taj Mahal."</b>
...............
<b>According to a 2005 World Health Organization report, India has only 4 doctors for every 10,000 people; in Britain, by contrast, there are 18. In rural India, state hospitals have little money for basic medical equipment or for maintenance of buildings, which are often filthy and overcrowded. India has less than one hospital bed and one physician for every 1,000 people,</b> the World Health Organization said.
...................
Dr. Naresh Trehan, a heart surgeon who set up a private cardiac hospital in New Delhi that attracts hundreds of foreign patients every year, dismissed the anxieties expressed in the British Medical Journal article.
"We hope that we can do this without affecting the treatment for the local population," Trehan said. "<b>It's like space travel. People will always say 'There is so much hunger, why are you doing it?' That's not the point.</b>
<b>"I see this as a complement to internal health care. We are putting in infrastructure."</b>
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->